The Ghost of Galileo

  A punk here pelts him with eggs. How so?

  For he did but kiss her, and so let her go

  .  .  .  .  .

  And there, while he gives the zealous bravado

  A rabbin confutes him with the bastinado.

  Luckily Wotton was gliding by in a gondola when the rabbi’s entourage turned belligerent. Rescuing Englishmen who trespassed on native sensibilities was a frequent service of the “thrice worthy [English] Ambassador.”84 The worthy ambassador had several Jewish friends, including his landlord and Leone Modena, the author of a famous account of Jewish practices composed for gentiles, perhaps with Wotton’s coaxing. Since Modena was one of the few rabbis in Venice who spoke Latin, he might have been the rabbi in Coryates’s tale. If so, Wotton’s timely appearance might not have been a miracle.85

  More dangerous than flirting with bawds or arguing with rabbis was talking with Jesuits. According to Joseph Hall, the man of Foolosophy, these sneaks knew the names of all notable English travelers, lay in wait for them, and (as we know from Tobie Matthew) turned their heads with gorgeous churches, exquisite music, and discourses they could not answer.86 The danger for heretics grew in proportion to distance south of Venice. Reliable advice to non-Catholic Englishmen planning a visit to Rome recommended learning another language well enough to pass as a native; in this way the famous traveler Fynes Moryson, presenting himself as a Frenchman, succeeded in gaining an interview with the future Urban VIII. In the Papal States or Naples, the wise Englishman avoided conversations with fellow countrymen, never talked with Italians about religion, and abstained from urging anyone to convert. As further precautions, he changed his residence and restaurant frequently, and never fell sick.87

  Wotton owed his ambassadorship to his mastery of masquerade. He became so thoroughly an Italian during his early travels that in 1601 he made it all the way from Florence, where he had earned the confidence of the Grand Duke, to Scotland, where, using the name Ottaviano Baldi, he obtained an interview with King James. He had come to warn James (so he said in Italian) against a papal plot to poison him, and to bring him, as a present from the Grand Duke, a box of infallible antidotes. Baldi then disclosed that, although the threat was real, he was a fake, not an Italian but an Englishman needing asylum. He had pretended to be a Florentine to bamboozle Queen Elizabeth’s spies: as the one-time foreign secretary to the treasonous Earl of Essex, he feared imprisonment if recognized.88 When James became King of England in 1603, he summoned Ottavio Baldi, knighted him, and sent him back to Italy as the first English ambassador to Venice since the accession of Elizabeth.89

  Wotton had adopted a more extravagant masquerade to visit Rome. Disguised as a German Catholic (he had learned the language perfectly), he drank like a Teuton, dressed like a buffoon, and in the guise of a conspicuous idiot came to know more about the operations of the Roman establishment and the papal court than (he boasted) any other non-Catholic Englishman. He stalked the pope. “The whore of Babylon I have seen mounted on her chair, going on the ground, reading, speaking, attired and disrobed.”90 He prudently gave up this counterfeit on being recognized and returned home to begin his unfortunate engagement by Essex.

  The master unmasker, Fra Paolo, was also the strongest advocate of dissimulation. He called it “moral medicine.” Just as a doctor sometimes deceives his patients to promote health or ease death, so may the politician and the priest tell lies to secure the state. Feign agreement, Sarpi says, guard your thoughts, volunteer nothing. “I have to wear a mask because without one no man can live in Italy.”91 The sure way to traverse the world safely, according to an experienced Roman courtier of Wotton’s acquaintance, is to keep “your thoughts close and your countenance loose [sciolto]”—that is, blank and open.92 “[B]eware ǀ You never speak a truth,” echoes Jonson’s Sir Politic Would-Be, summing up his Venetian lessons, “And then, for your religion, profess none ǀ But wonder at the diversity of all.” The English Sarpi advised similar behavior: “nakedness is uncomely, as well in mind as in body; and it addeth no small reverence, to men’s manners and actions, if they be not altogether open …Therefore set it down, that an habit of secrecy, is both politic and moral.”93 Copernican astronomers followed the advice: Kepler urged its use in the great cause, and Galileo’s spokesman in the Dialogue states more than once that he wears a mask.94

  Beguiling, inspiring, seductive, frightening, repellent—thus was Italy in the eyes of the Stuart traveler. The land of Titian, Galileo, and Sarpi, but also the headquarters of Jesuits, popes, and the Inquisition; home to the world’s most accomplished artists and assassins, rational philosophers and duplicitous theologians, nuns and courtesans. The longer the unprotected Protestant tarried among the allurements and dangers, the more likely and fearful his fall. That is what Sir Thomas Parker warned in his Essay on Travailes of 1606. Beware of Italy! Beware the “infinite corruptions, almost inevitable, that invest travailers after small abode there.”95 Would you let your son go to Italy? Travel can be broadening, answers Wotton. “But these effects are not general, many receiving more good in their Bodies by the tossing of the Ship, whilst they are at Sea, than benefit in their Minds by breathing a foreign Air, when they come to Land.”96 Quite right, says Sir Politic, scoffing at “That idle, antique, stale, grey-headed project ǀ of knowing men’s minds and manners.”97 Yet it is also true, answers Coryat, that knowing the bad can do a virtuous man good. “[He] will be more confirmed and settled in virtue by observation of some vices.”98

  Wotton did what he could to direct observation in the right direction. He ran something of a “college” (as Coryat called it) of art and architecture in which Englishmen could learn to appreciate things they could not see at home.99 Few of them came with any knowledge of fine art, indeed, saw little difference between good painting, house decoration, and face painting. Bankes’s patron, Lord William Howard, a man of wide experience and antiquarian tastes, engaged the same man to mend his cabinets, paint his house, and portray his family.100 The portraits travelers may have seen at home tended to be flat and decorative, as in the gorgeous presentations of Elizabeth; or to be rough and approximate, as in the depictions of relatives; or missing, as in foregone representations of the Savior, Apostles, and Martyrs.101 People who did appreciate fine painting knew it primarily from the work of north European masters. After 1600, modern Italian art slowly made headway among English connoisseurs; but as late as the 1620s, according to one of Francis Cleyn’s painter friends, Edward Norgate, “chiaroscuro” was just plain obscure to most of James’s subjects. Henry Peacham, the designer of perfect courtiers, hesitated before recommending knowledge of painting of any kind in The Compleat Gentleman (1622). And, when Robert Burton finally included painting among remedies to melancholy in the fourth edition of his Anatomy (1632), he omitted modern Italian art from his therapeutic examples.102

  Wotton played a major role in bringing his countrymen to appreciate Venetian art. Acting as consultant to travelers and purchasers at home, he helped English connoisseurs to value the older Italian masters, above all, Titian, and, among the newer, the Carracci, Caravaggio, and Guido Reni. Occasionally he gave a valuable work to a patron able to appreciate it; less sensitive souls got cheese.103 The greatest of the connoisseurs whose appetite he sharpened was the haughty Catholic Earl of Arundel, whom the Venetians knew as the extravagantly rich premier noble of England and treated accordingly.104 In time Arundel’s passion for collecting art and artists exceeded even his pride in the exploits of his family. A year after regaining England in 1614 with trunksful of art objects and a gondola, he began to accumulate a virtual academy of artists and intellectuals with virtual headquarters in his Italianate London establishment, Arundel House. Among its members were the authority on gentlemanly manners Peacham and the artist Norgate, who taught Arundel’s children to draw and gathered paintings for him in Italy.105 Among other frequent visitors to Arundel House was the earl’s uncle, Lord William Howard.

  Arundel’s Italian p
ictures inspired emulation in the shallow mind of King James’s favorite, Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset. He and Arundel made use of Wotton, Carleton, and the same Daniel Nijs who acted as intermediary between Wotton and Sarpi to procure paintings. When Carr fell from grace, Arundel had the pick of his collection and so, until King Charles entered the competition, built up the finest collection of Italian art in England.106 He also promoted the visits of important north European artists, including Mytens, Van Dyck, and Cleyn. Portraiture was another route by which Venetian painting came to the attention of Englishmen. Carleton, Wotton, Arundel, Lady Arundel, and others who could afford it sat for Domenico Robusti (Tintoretto junior), who painted their portraits about the same time he did Galileo’s.107

  With Wotton’s advice, English travelers explored the modern churches, palaces, and villas in which the recent artistic productions of Italy were open to view. Wotton had made a particular study of the writings of Palladio, Serlio, and Scamozzi and their buildings in the Veneto, and collected their architectural drawings. At the end of his third stay as ambassador, he deposited his knowledge of the art in his Elements of Architecture (1624), a piece of pedagogy designed to help him to win appointment as Provost of Eton College. The book impressed the then-current favorite, the Duke of Buckingham, the King, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, and helped Wotton win the post over the formidable competition of Bacon and Carleton.108

  Wotton’s Elements, though an epitome of Venetian practice, is regarded as the first original English work on architectural theory.109 It employs technical terms previously wanting in English, which Wotton introduced together with the observation that their lack indicated the relative inferiority of English architects.110 Neither the argument nor the evaluation applied to Inigo Jones, who had lived in Venice and had access to Wotton’s collection of architectural drawings. Jones was to incorporate Venetian concepts in English buildings following a steady royal ascent: he began as “picture-maker” to Christian IV of Denmark, who passed him on as a designer of stage sets to his sister Queen Anna of England, who passed him on as a surveyor of palaces to her son Henry Prince of Wales.111 After Henry’s death in 1612, Jones returned to Italy with the Arundels. During their stay in 1613–14 he sketched villas, temples, and palaces, both ancient and Palladian, and allowed himself to be sketched by one of Galileo’s portraitists, Francesco Villamena.112

  Jones’s importation of Italian styles included stage sets. The first among many extended notes that he made on his copy of Palladio’s Quatri libri dell’architectura (1601) described the theater at Vicenza where Palladio painted scenes in perspective to give the illusion of depth to the stage. That was a great accomplishment, although Palladio’s scene did not change: “the cheaf artifice was that where so ever you satt you saw on[e] of these Prospectives.” Deception everywhere! Serlio’s Five Books of Architecture (1611) treats perspective in detail before applying it to stage design. He advised that tragedies be set in grand houses in which the noble people destined for trouble can suffer comfortably and that comedies take place on a street with ordinary houses, “but especially there must not want a brawthell or bawdy house, and a great Inne, and a Church; such things are of necessities therein.”113 Jonson often followed this advice.

  To effect the quick changes that made the spectacle, Jones improved on machinery he had seen in Florence and Venice. A rotatable stage with different back-to-back scenes, pairs of parallel sliding shutters with different perspective views, openings under the main stage for underground activities, rising and descending platforms for heavenly ones, created a three-dimensional hieroglyph, to use the term of the author of Queen Anna’s first masque in England, Samuel Daniel.114 The most evident hieroglyphs bound the heavens, in which the stage machinery placed the gods and personifications who appeared in the masques, to the earth of everyday experience. Messages ran from the gods to the earthlings below as so many siderei nuncii; “the entire celestial world that is said to govern the universe [is revealed] as if through a magical and powerful telescope…[showing] what is happening in the moon…[and] the stars dancing.”115 Masque-goers frequently encountered astronomical hieroglyphs in Jones’s engineering and his collaborator Ben Jonson’s plays. And theatrical hieroglyphs reciprocally occurred in the frontispieces to astronomical books, notably Galileo’s Dialogue.116

  From all of which follows that no one had to face the dangers of travel to know the binary calculus of Italy. The English stage, anti-papal propaganda, the doings of Sarpi, De Dominis, and Galileo, the lure and lore of Venice, travel books, competition for artworks, Jones’s buildings, and so on, kept the puzzle of Italy alive among stay-at-home gentlemen like Sir John Bankes through the reigns of the first Stuarts.

  2

  Religious Noise

  The rise of the sixth James of Scotland to the first James of England brought Calvinist Scots, Irish Catholics, and English Protestants uncomfortably under the same rule. The Protestants had their own jarring sects, which Bentivoglio summarized for the Vatican soon after James had ascended the English throne. Though a papal nuncio, Bentivoglio did not admire Rome’s slavish adherence to the doctrines of Trent and drew up a fair assessment of the religious scene in England.1 He judged that the Protestants or Anglocalvinisti, who dominated parliament, were less fanatical than the fewer Calvinists who followed Geneva (puri Calvinisti or Puritans). He reported that the two sects agreed in dogma but differed over governance and liturgy. The Protestants retained ecclesiastical offices, most of the old liturgy, and the king as head of their religion. The Puritans rejected the hierarchy, the liturgy, and, as religious leader, the king.2

  Bentivoglio rated James a convinced heretic with a ridiculous addiction to religious controversy that exposed him to dangerous flattery. Queen Anna is a Catholic and proves it by not attending Protestant services, but (in Bentivoglio’s opinion) her love of entertainments and amusements, and her facile and changeable character, leave the question of her religion open. Their first born, Henry, Prince of Wales, gives signs of being a vehement heretic. The greatest nobles are openly or covertly Catholic, the rest mostly Protestant. The middling nobility contains a large component of Puritans, the lower classes a greater, the city plebs more yet. Lower-class Catholics live in the country. The open Catholics and those protected by the great lords amount to around a thirtieth of the population. Subtracting them, crypto-Catholics, and indifferent believers, Bentivoglio estimated the number of devoted heretics at about a fifth of the English population.3

  Continuing his report, Bentivoglio observed that the papal agent in England, Archpriest George Blackwell, supervised clergy trained at St Omer (run by the Jesuits) and at Douai (seculars), quasi-military establishments “where spiritual soldiers learn their discipline.” When on mission, they make war on one another, particularly over the Oath of Allegiance. And no doubt the oath was offensive, particularly the unnecessarily obnoxious clause, “I do abhorre, detest and abjure as impious and Hereticall this damnable doctrine and position, That Princes can be excommunicated or deprived by the Pope, [and] may be deposed or murthered by their Subjects.” Nonetheless, Archpriest Blackwell took the oath.4 So did many “church papists,” as the godly called Catholics who obeyed the Elizabethan statute requiring attendance at the parish church on Sundays and feast days. Dissembling church papists might escape recusancy fines and preserve their inheritances, “wear[ing] the maske of the Gospel…to save…charges.”5

  From the safety of the Spanish Netherlands, Bentivoglio advised Rome not to tolerate the stratagems of church papists. Despite fines and forfeitures, the faith seemed to be strengthening in England. “And as fire is more intense the more enclosed it is, so the zeal of the Catholics of this reign is the more enflamed and invigorated the greater the obstacles they have encountered in not being allowed to practice and proselytize openly.”6 James would vacillate capriciously over imposition of the penalties for refusing the oath, whereas the war between the Jesuits and the seculars continued dependably to divide the Catholic
community in Britain.7

  James’s Polyphony

  James’s first act on entering England in 1603 was to attend a sermon. The preacher, Tobie Matthew senior, then Bishop of Durham, advised James to accept English civil and religious life as he found it. Ignoring the advice, James doubled the number of weekly sermons.8 Since the godly preferred sermons to prayers, they took hope from his addiction and petitioned him to enforce observance of the Sabbath, elimination of pluralism, and abolition of popish ceremonies, vestments, and terminology. James invited them to send four of their party to a conference at Hampton Court in 1604 to dispute with a force of eight bishops commanded by the Archbishop of Canterbury. James found against them, not unexpectedly, since Basilikon doron condemns Puritans as “verie pestes in the Church and Common-Weale.” Blunting the blow, James agreed to diminish pluralism, commission a new translation of the Bible, and appoint the Calvinists Tobie Matthew and George Abbot as archbishops. Matthew went to York in 1606, Abbot to Canterbury in 1611.9

  James balanced his religious books by accepting most sorts of non-Puritan Protestantism. Although his archbishops were Calvinists, his favorite preacher, Lancelot Andrewes, opposed them; and when he ordered up a sextet of sermonizers in 1609, three were pro- and three anti-Calvinist.10 Among the latter was Maurice William’s patron, the future Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. James’s brother-in-law, King Christian IV of Denmark, brought in another variety of Protestantism, Lutheranism, to which James had to attend as claimant to the international leadership of reformed religion. His management of the discord among the factions represented by Abbot, Matthew, Andrewes, and Christian gave him the confidence, and Protestants at home and abroad the impression, that he was a natural leader; while his knowledge of theology and toleration of Catholics who took the oath recommended him to those who, like the Catholic De Dominis and the Lutheran Kepler, believed in the possibility of a reunited Christian church.11