Figure 20 Paul van Somer, James I of England. The king is shown standing in a window of Whitehall with the almost finished Banqueting Hall in the background (1620).
Jones’s masterpiece received its finishing touch in 1635 with three huge ceiling paintings by Rubens. They celebrate good King James as a unifying Solomon who brought together the Crowns of England and Scotland; as an irenic Solomon who lavished Peace and Plenty on both; and, in the great oval centerpiece, as a dead Solomon who went to heaven in the company of Justice, Faith, and Religion. The paintings required a sacrifice beyond payment of £3,000 to the artist. Masques and plays could no longer be acted there because the smoke from the torches illuminating the performances might spoil the paintings.61
The coincidence of the start of Jones’s great Palladian hall with the inauguration of the Mortlake tapestry works, and with Prince Charles’s purchase of Raphael’s cartoons for hangings depicting The Acts of the Apostles, suggests either a grand design or unusual luck. Several sovereigns, notably Christian IV and Henry IV, had set up or encouraged tapestry works in connection with major building projects. King James may have destined Mortlake products for new state apartments and for the Banqueting House, where Mortlake’s Acts of the Apostles did hang on state occasions. Hiring the “Titian of tapestry” (our Cleyn) to decorate the Banqueting House of a king of England with tapestries designed for a pope of Rome, and engaging the Catholic Rubens to paint its ceiling with a celebration of the Protestant James, exemplified the religious–artistic miscegenation of the early Stuart courts.62 Rubens’s paintings, Jones’s building, and the ghosts of Cleyn’s tapestries make a powerful symbol for those who can read it. These were the last emblems of his reign that Charles saw before stepping out of the Banqueting House onto the scaffold, where he became a martyr to his father’s teaching that he was “a little God to sit on his throne, and rule over other men.”63
Queen Anna’s Masques
The brave new Queen of Scotland, scarcely 16 years old, entered her uncomfortable capital of Edinburgh on May Day 1590, accompanied by 36 dames on horseback and an entourage of 200. The welcoming speeches, of which she could not have understood much, included one by Ceres, who addressed her primly in Latin, and another by Bacchus, who, more to the taste of her new subjects, “[sat] upon a puncheon of wine, winking, and casting it by cups full upon the people.”64 These were not the manners of the German princes her parents had tried to imitate. Anna had some financial resources, however, which allowed her to improve her immediate surroundings; and she might have made an austere home for the muses in Scotland had James owned all the property he gave her.65 In 1599 and again in 1601, she defied killjoy ministers by bringing in a traveling troupe of English actors. Perhaps the setting of Hamlet (published in 1602) with its many references to then recent Danish history owed something to the parentage of the Queen of Scotland.66 Among her affronts to Calvinism, however, her encouragement of the theater paled against her covert conversion to Catholicism, which she underwent around 1600, despite her inaugural oath to “withstand and dispys all papisticall superstitiones, and quhatsumever ceremonies and rites contrair to the word of God.” The move to England in 1603 gave Anna greater control of financial resources and a circle of aristocratic ladies who patronized the arts. By the time of her death she disposed of a considerable income: £24,000 a year from her jointure, £13,000 from duties on sugar and cloth, and something from licensing foreigners to fish in British waters.67 Still she ended in debt. One reason for it, and the extravagance that made Bentivoglio doubt her piety, was the cost of her masques, her main contribution to English culture.68
These performances began with the queen and her ladies displayed, masked, in magnificent costumes on an elaborate stage. The cast proceeded to dance, by themselves and then with partners from the audience. All were mute: professional actors spoke and sang, and professional musicians played. Dancing was the centerpiece. The queen and her retinue spent much time in rehearsing, from two to five weeks, and much money on costumes, which might cost upwards of £300 each. Among the retinue wealthy enough to appear in several masques, the queen’s favorite, Alethea Talbot, deserves mention: as Lady Arundel, she would be a lavish and knowledgeable patron of painters.69
The masques highlighted dancing for its mundane pleasures and, for those seeking symbols, for its cosmic mimicry. The stars and planets dance to the music of the spheres, the elements continually change partners, sound is the fluttering of the air, and tides the choreography of the sea; only the solid earth stays put:
Although some wits enrich’d with learning’s skill
Say heav’n stands firm, and that the earth doth fleet
And swiftly turneth underneath their feet.
Either way, according to Sir John Davies, who wrote these words, the apparent motions of the stars invite us to dance, prove the nobility of dancing, and illustrate the concord of the universe.70 Davies’s interpretation of the universe as the domain of Terpsichore dates from 1596, when he enjoyed associations with Oxford and the London Society of Antiquaries.
The first of Anna’s English masques, Samuel Daniel’s Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, marked the high point in the play-filled Christmas season of 1603–4, when James, wishing to initiate his reign properly, entertained foreign ambassadors as well as his Scottish favorites and English courtiers. Invitations were scarce and prized: and, since not all ambassadors received them, the Vision, like all Anna’s masques, had a political edge.71 In her second play, Jonson’s Masque of Blackness (January 1605), her company appeared blackened, as daughters of the god of the Niger, who wanted them whitewashed—a process that could be accomplished only under the scarce sun of Britannia. The audience shuddered to see their English roses blackened and disliked the play (Figure 21). Jonson and Jones redeemed themselves in their next try, The Masque of Beauty (January 1608), in which the nymphs, whitened and bejeweled, and four others wanting bleaching, returned to Britannia on a floating island. This piece of stage wizardry in the Italian style also carried an orchestra and figures representing the eight elements of feminine beauty, which prudence deters itemizing. No doubt the French ambassador was outraged that his Spanish counterpart received an invitation and he did not. He missed a good show. James liked it so much that he demanded encores and, despite its cost of £3,000, asked Anna to provide another masque for the following year.72
Figure 21 Inigo Jones, sketch of a participant in Jones’s and Jonson’s Masque of Blackness (1605).
For £5,000 she supplied The Masque of the Queens, which introduced the antimasque, a prelude or interlude intended by its quirkiness to bring out the sober beauty of the main action. Antimasques also offered opportunity for metaphorical political commentary with relative impunity. The antimasque of Queens centered on a smoke-filled pit from which emerged thirteen witches played by professional actors. The hag in charge introduces them—Ignorance, Suspicion, Credulity, Falsehood, Murmur, Malice, Impudence, Slander, Execution, Bitterness, Rage, and Mischief—who might have served as personifications of witch-hunters like King James. The witches boast storm powers, chant charms, and vanish with their Hell. In their place appears the House of Fame, whence twelve queens led by Bal-Anna ride forth in chariots, alight, and dance.73
Smoke-filled pits easily appeared when resin fell on an open flame and Hell’s mouths and dragons’ breath became pleasant and plausible with a little sal-ammoniac and brandy. Since torches and candles provided the illumination and reflectors multiplied the light, masques were literally smoke and mirrors.74 The optical effects combined with loud music to drown out stage machinery and perfumed perspiring bodies completed the assault on the senses. On the mind, however, the beauty of the costumes, status of the performers, and veiled intent of the playwrights imposed a compelling three-dimensional hieroglyph; or so said Daniel, following Jonson and anticipating Bacon, who recommended hieroglyphs and parables in general, “because arguments cannot be made so perspicuous nor true examples so apt.”75 Appreciating a mas
que, putting together the hieroglyphs as symbol, allegory, myth, analogy, celebration, or protest, took some effort. The chief hieroglyph in Anna’s performances is easily deciphered, however: women made the masque “the most developed courtly pastime and formal social occasion of the English Renaissance.”76
For her son Henry’s investiture as Prince of Wales in June 1610, Anna gave a masque written by Daniel, staged by Jones, and starring herself. Princess Elizabeth, acting in a masque for the first time, appeared as a Nymph of the Nile. Six months later it was Henry’s turn, in Oberon, the Faery Prince (New Year’s Day 1611), which he commissioned from Jonson and Jones. Oberon opened with some satyrs playing on a boulder as they awaited the arrival of the faery prince and his company on a couch drawn by two white bears. Simultaneously musicians sang a hymn of praise and reassurance to King James: “[He] in his owne true Circle, still doth runne ǀ And holds his course, as certayne as the sunne.” The prince then led his followers in their own geometrical courses. A month later Anna gave her Jonsonian masque, Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly, which required Cupid, chained by the Sphinx, to solve a riddle to save himself and eleven beautiful maidens of the morning. The riddle: find a world without a world where everything is done by a fixed eye that moves and whose power rests on the mixture of contraries never previously joined. Cupid instantly answers “woman.” Wrong. The Sphinx prepares to annihilate Love. Cupid tries again: “the King of Albion.” Right. Love’s recognition of the joint power of king and parliament vanquishes the evil Sphinx.77
The royals sat through many plays and masques, an average of twenty-five a year, most of them crammed into the holiday season between November and February. The sabbath presented no obstacle to these revels or to the abbreviation of costumes. “[Anna’s] clothes were not so much below the knee but that we might see a woman had both feet and legs, which I [Dudley Carleton speaking] never knew before.”78 Submitting to these entertainments could be grueling. In February 1613, having just seen two long performances, James could not stomach a third. In March 1615, on his first visit to Cambridge, he sat through four successive evenings of theater, three of them in Latin. One was George Ruggle’s Ignoramus, perhaps the most popular of academic comedies. James liked it so much he returned to Cambridge to see it again. Its fun depends largely on the broken Latin spoken by the lawyer Ambidexter Ignoramus and his clerk Dulman, who thus recommends the play:
O Lector Friendlie…tibi Wittum, tibi Jestaque plurima sellam
. . . . .
Hic multum Frenchum, quo possis vincere Wenchum
Hic est Latinum, quo possis sumere vinum.79
The tired plot employs a clever servant to prevent an old man (Ignoramus) from buying a young wife. Two fake priests accuse Ignoramus of diabolic possession for his unseemly lust and call out his devils by taking his legal terms to be their names. Ignoramus: if she married me she would have francum bancum. Priest: “Be gone, Francum Bancum.” Ignoramus: She would also have Infangthief, Outfangthief, Tac, Toc, Tol, and Tem, which, by the way, she would have had if she had married John Bankes. Priest: “How many there are of them! Be gone all of you…Come forth you evil spirits, whether you be in his doublet, or his breeches, cloak, drawers, pen, wax, seal, inkhorn, indentures, parchments …”80 James took great pleasure in the insults to the lawyers he blamed for the obstruction of his programs by parliament.
The lawyers railed at their treatment in Cambridge and composed many epigrams at the expense of scholars; but Gray’s Inn’s Masque of Mountebanks, performed before the king in 1618, struck instead at quack doctors.
This powder doth preserve from fate
This cures the Maleficiate
Lost Maydenhead this doth restore
And makes them Virgins as before.
The play also pokes fun at astrology. Physicians and surgeons relied on associations between zodiacal signs and body parts to determine times for bloodletting. The antihero of Ignoramus escapes gelding because the moon occupies the sign supervising the parts he would lose.81 Albumazar, the only play in English James saw in Cambridge in 1615, involves such deep concepts of astrology that its resume must be put off pending further instruction. The same consideration applies to Technogamia (1617), a tedious play written and performed by scholars of Christ Church, Oxford, in the summer of 1621, which has in its favor some references to the Copernican system. Notice of Jonson’s embroidery of Galileo’s observations of the moon into the news that lunarians are humans covered with feathers need not be postponed, however, and is hereby given.82
Invitations to entertainments continued to have political significance. At a masque given by Prince Charles in January 1621, the ambassadors of Tuscany, France, and Savoy being in attendance, and Charles and Buckingham competing in pirouettes, “the former Archbishop of Spalato, who daily advances in esteem and favour,” stood near the king among a swarm of lords.83 And it may be remembered that, soon after his arrival in England, George Conn was with the royal couple in Oxford at the performance of Floating Island.
Anna kept many musicians for her entertainments: a masque such as Oberon required around 60 instrumentalists and Triumph of Peace, the Inns’ potlatch of 1634, employed perhaps 100 musicians of whom 40 were lutenists.84 Many occasions besides masques needed singers. A refined evening with the queen might begin with an after-supper menu of French songs in her privy chamber before her closer friends withdrew to her bedchamber to hear “mr Lanier, excellently singinge & playinge on the lute.”85 Nicholas Lanier came from a family of Italian musicians close to the court; like them, he wrote music for masques and, like other artists with taste and connections, he improved the Stuart art scene by buying pictures abroad for patrons at home.86
Christian IV urged his sister to fill her palaces with art. She began modestly, with miniatures; her miniaturist, Isaac Oliver, led her to portraits, and on to landscapes and religious works, mainly by Dutch and Flemish artists.87 Eventually she included the sorts of Italian paintings recommended by Wotton and collected by Somerset and Arundel. Since Italian (and Spanish) art often depicted scenes too close to popery or vice to recommend it to Puritans, and religious paintings had no place in their ways of worship, Catholics were more likely to appreciate it than Protestants. As we learned earlier from Prynne, strict Puritans would not risk even portraiture for fear of creating golden calves from prettified women.88 Consequently many art agents were Catholics, and the great collections they helped to make during the reigns of the first Stuarts belonged to or were started by Catholics or Catholic sympathizers.89
Queen Anna stands high among them. Arundel qualifies twice or thrice: he acquired an interest in painting from his great-uncle, Lord John Lumley, a strong Catholic who spent time in prison for conspiracies until released to cultivate his accumulations of books, buildings, and art; Lumley’s large collection of paintings consisted overwhelmingly of portraits chosen rather for the sitter than for the painter. Lady Arundel, who began collecting with the help of Wotton and Jones, remained a Catholic after her husband’s conversion. “The chief lady of the court and kingdom” by Venetian estimate, she returned from Italy, after seeing to a proper Catholic education for her children, with Van Dyck in tow.90 Arundel’s great rival as a collector before Charles entered the competition was the Duke of Buckingham, who, though “illiterate” according to Wotton, knew how to get what he wanted.91 His closest female relatives, his wife and mother, were Catholics.
Prince Henry’s Projects
Prince Henry’s Puritanical streak and quick martial spirit, which made him the rallying point of English prudes and hawks, put him temperamentally and spiritually at odds with his father. But Henry cheerfully followed James’s advice to abstain entirely from the works of Buchanan and, if free to do so, would have done the same to most literature. His interests ran to practical subjects, to the uses of arms and horses, techniques of building, geography and architecture, modern languages, applied mathematics. After 1610, under the influence of Arundel and perhaps
Jones, the Prince developed an interest in art. Henry had very firm and sober opinions for a boy of 16 and courtiers aplenty to promote them.92
Our interest in Henry’s short-lived initiatives and the men who served them lies in their likely impact on Charles, who idolized his elder brother. Two people in Henry’s entourage would be particularly important for Charles: Jones, who kept under Charles the office of Surveyor he had acquired under James, and Arundel. Charles learned less directly but more substantively from the applied mathematicians whom Henry retained: an Italian and a French architect, Costantino de’ Servi and Salomon de Caus, and two well-traveled English mathematicians, Edward Wright and William Barlow. They tutored Henry for several years. Although he did not attain an expertise in mathematics unbecoming a prince, he no doubt fully understood its elements.93 So did Charles.
Wright was an experienced navigator and champion of the Mercator projection, whose construction he simplified in a work, Certaine Errors in Navigation (1610), which he dedicated to Henry. The prince had a strong interest in exploration and colonization, and hence in navigation, and in mathematical instruments and mechanical automata like Drebbel’s perpetuum mobile and Wright’s clockwork celestial automaton.94 That he cultivated an interest in astronomy may be inferred from his purchase of an expensive telescope and his request to the Florentine Resident, Ottaviano Lotti, for a copy of Galileo’s Sidereus nuncius. Lotti complied and added a music book useful for masques by Galileo’s father Vincenzo, and (a perceptive diplomat) a shipload of wine for King James.95
Henry never traveled abroad but surrounded himself with men who did. Coryate’s Crudities (1611) gained its author appointment as court historiographer. Henry’s chamberlain, comptroller, and chief tutor extended his vicarious Italian experience. He admired the spirit of Venice and would have fought for it against Rome had war come and James let him—an infatuation that left its trace in the Latin translation of Sarpi’s Trent later made by Henry’s chief tutor Adam Newton for the use of anti-Roman theologians.96 Henry’s precocious understanding of the value of spectaculars in promoting royalty also drew his attention to Italy. The ceremony by which Venice annually married the sea was a benchmark; but, for displays more applicable to the terra firma of England, Florence took the prize. Henry dispatched one of his Italian hands, Sir John Harington, the translator of Galileo’s favorite piece of literature, Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, to Florence to observe the blowout around the wedding of Galileo’s student Cosimo II to Maria Maddelena of Austria in 1609. Henry probably had an eye to entertainments for his upcoming investiture as Prince of Wales and for his wedding, already under discussion, with an Italian princess.97
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