Movimento!  Early Dance and Theatre Ensemble

If you were to show the average passer-by the letters MASQUE on a piece of paper, most I suspect would see a misspelling of MASK. If they read correctly, they would then think of masquerade. Some might go on from there to the idea of Carnival; most, however, would probably think next of a Fancy Dress Ball –i.e. the sort of party which grown-ups throw when they want to have an especially expensive game of Mr. Dressup.

That might well lead to Opera, which is generally held to be the Masque’s principal modern descendant. If so, those for whom Opera is that peculiar spectator sport in which the knifed hero sings instead of bleeding, would have no trouble in linking masque to Dr. Johnson’s notorious definition of Opera, as “an exotic and irrational entertainment”, and applying that to the whole affair, right from the start: even though he was actually only talking about Italian Opera, as presented in Hanoverian London.

That of course is a caricature: and one which deliberately lays a false trail into the bargain, in order to point to the fallacies of reading history backwards. Which is not to say that it is wrong to think of opera as descended from masque, but rather to suggest that undeniably close and strong though the connections may be, they can also mislead: especially if one thinks simply in terms of the seemingly obvious similarities. I would in fact suggest that though Opera, like Masque, combines music and often dance with elaborate costume and scenery, what happens on the operatic stage is ultimately rather less fundamental as a connection to Masque, than the social nature of the entire occasion itself, and the performance being enacted, not just on the Stage as such, but in the Opera House as a whole, by the audience: especially on first nights. And that, I think, points to a very significant difference. Operatic action turns in most cases on the depiction, enactment and consequences of false or mistaken identities, even when the ultimate purpose is the revelation of truth. Masque, on the other hand, is directly about the emblematic representation of ideally true identities and relationships, so as to express, through its courtly participants, the way in which the human world should be ordered.

From this perspective, it may be more useful to ask where masque itself came from, than to try to track what it led to: to envision it not as opera’s precursor, but as a kind of neo-platonic liturgy, half-secular perhaps in its often magical and mythological contents, but still closely akin in purpose and form to religious ritual, not least (especially in a country now at least ostensibly Protestant) that of the Catholic Mass. Behind this lay the preoccupation of Renaissance and early Baroque humanism with the right ordering of human affairs in accord with the ideal, Platonic Forms of the Cosmos itself. This was the true moral purpose of the State, which was thus not just a necessary evil in an otherwise random and brutish world, nor just in some sense a contractual defender of certain rights and liberties; but, in the phrase of Jacob Burkhardt, as a Work of Art, centred on its Prince and his Court. It was these, especially the Prince himself (who was vouchsafed knowledge forbidden to other mortals), who mediated between the human microcosm and the divine macrocosm, connecting the first with the second and shaping it accordingly. Thus, to quote

“Renaissance philosophers frequently employed analogy and expressed themselves largely in . . .”poetic” diction, mythological parallels and symbols rich in imaginative element. . . .Significantly, it was not only the philosopher and scientist studying the nature of the universe but the poet as well who, by universal analogy was able to discover and express the common pattern in the world created by God. The court masque then may be treated as a model of this universe. . . Neoplatonists believed that divine reality, of which our world is merely a poor imitation, its perfect harmony, proportion, goodness and virtue, could be envisioned by the artist . . .and communicated to the recipients of his art’.

That is from an essay on “The Masque of Stuart Culture”, a title which says that the whole of Stuart Culture was a Masque: in fact one example of a general human condition, since all culture is masque. It’s a nice conceit; but if so, what of reality; how do Queen Anna (never Anne), her husband and their respective courtiers measure up to the theory? Did the Emperor’s new clothes amount to anything, or was he all too visibly “ in the altogether”?

First, we need to notice two important features of the landscape: the change in mood following the passing of Elizabeth in 1603, and the different dynamic at court – or rather now courts – brought about by the arrival of James’s wife.

This was the first uneventful, uncontested succession since that of Henry VIII 94 years before, and only the second since that of Henry V in 1413, nearly two centuries ago; and it had not been a foregone conclusion. The succession question had been the most recurrent issue in high politics ever since the early 1570’s, when it had finally become clear that there was more to be lost than gained from trying to persuade Elizabeth to marry. The abortive rebellion of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, who thought that as the last Plantagenet and self-proclaimed male head of England’s old honour nobility, he should determine the next ruler, was only two years in the past; as the Queen aged, reversion to the Wars of the Roses was not such a distant prospect. So the mood when Elizabeth died in her bed and James made his unopposed way south from Scotland was one of relief: “Thank heaven the old girl has snuffed it at last. Phew! We’ve got a real King again, without any fuss, and with two surviving sons”. It was not to last, of which more later; but it did mean that the new reign did, to begin with, seem to many to offer the prospect of turning Masque into Reality.

That was to be unexpectedly complicated. The arrival of Anna meant that for the first time since the last of Henry’s wives (and in political effect since his first two) there had to be two separate households, and two different courts. Elizabeth, of course, had had her own Privy Chamber, a closed shop composed largely of ladies from a small and exclusive circle of families. But since she had operated politically as a Prince (the word is important: it meant much more then than it does today. Derived from the Latin Princeps, it meant sovereign ruler, one who had no earthly superior: as she told Sir Robert Cecil very close to the end of her life when he told her she must rest, “little man, the word must is not to be spoken to Princes ) and thus as symbolic head (Essex notwithstanding) of a male aristocracy, she had always maintained a strict line between the women of her Privy Chamber and the affairs of her Privy Council. Now, with male headship at least nominally restored, a role and a place had to be found for his equally Royal Consort, if only as “principal member of the female gender in England” or as the Americans put it nowadays, as “First Lady”.

If you look up Anne of Denmark in the Oxford Handbook of British History, you won’t find much: born1574, died 1619; daughter of Frederic II of Denmark and Norway; married James VI of Scotland 23 Nov 1589; coronation May 1590; suspected of Catholicism when she refused the sacrament at her English coronation, July 1603; elder son. Henry Prince of Wales died 1612 leaving his younger brother Charles (born 1600) as heir; interested in the arts - 

“ an amiable woman who enjoyed masques and dancing; her husband James, with a taste for theological disputation, found her frivolous. She suffered from Gout and Dropsy for many years, though her death in 1619 was sudden. She died intestate, leaving heavy debts, an indication of earlier extravagance.”

That manages not to say quite a lot.

First of all, Anna’s parents: her father, Frederic II, was not exactly a nobody. As patron of the great observational astronomer Tycho Brahe, whose observatory at Uraniborg ( itself virtually a little kingdom) played a crucial part in confirming the new Copernican cosmology, he had put Denmark on the cutting edge of European knowledge. Her mother too, Sophia of Mecklenberg, shared these ambitions, aspiring to govern as Queen Dowager during the minority of her son Christian IV following Frederic’s death in 1588; and when the Danish nobility partially blocked this by entrusting him to four guardians of their own choosing, continuing to keep her own court, at which she received ambassadors and pursued her own scientific studies. [We might note in passing that John Dowland served as Christian IV’s lutenist, 1598-1606]

As for Anna herself, it seems pretty clear that she was her parents’ daughter. Married by proxy at fifteen to James VI of Scotland in 1589, she had learned very quickly to navigate independently and very effectively in the factional minefield which surrounded the Scottish Crown. Widely held by the latest legal and historical scholarship to be elective rather than simply or exclusively hereditary, this was beset by three general problems: the constant need to repair the shifting consensus with the Scottish magnates which was vital to its survival [not entirely unlike Ottawa and the Provinces]; the machinations of the Calvinistically reformed Kirk which, not satisfied with its own internal self-government, was bent on outright political power as its divine right [New Presbyter/Old Priest writ large]; and confusing both of these, the danger of blood feud and local vendetta among the Nobles themselves, which threatened continuously to reduce Scottish affairs to what a later victim of them Archbishop Sharp of St Andrew as to describe not long before his own assassination in 1679 as “a drunken fumble in the dark” .

In view of James’s decidedly mixed reputation in his southern kingdom (“The wisest fool in Christendom” etc etc.), it should be remembered to his credit that he handled this not exactly unpoisoned chalice with considerable ability, neutralizing or destroying the power of the most dangerous of the Scottish earls, stabilizing the authority of the monarchy and its associated offices, developing his own writings on the Divine Right of Kings, so notorious later, specifically to face down the Kirk [“That’s for me tae know, and for ye tae find out!”]; and learning the survival skills which, at the end of the day, would see him, like Elizabeth, die in his bed and pass all his kingdoms to his uncontested heir in 1625.

Anna’s own activities in all this were directed towards two ends: developing her own circle of connection and affinity among the nobility, centred on the Earl of Huntley and his Countess, her near contemporary and close friend; and then, from 1594 onwards, using this in a campaign which recalls her mother’s as Queen Dowager of Denmark, to resist, persistently and eventually successfully, the intent of the Scottish Privy Council to place her first-born son, Prince Henry [more later] under the control of the Earl of Mar, as hereditary guardian of the Scottish heir, confined to Stirling Castle. We can pass over the details, but there were two important consequences: First, that Anna’s factional connections aligned her with the Catholic element in the Scottish nobility, still strong and significantly French-influenced. Second that her course of action frequently placed her in direct opposition to the wishes and policies of the King and his council: to the extent that in 1592-3, when she effectively dared James to imprison her, despatches to William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s alter ego, reported that Scotland “so now stands as there is but the King and Queen and the Chancellor[Maitland], that the King must forsake and leave the Chancellor, or leave the Queen”. It begins to look as if the later picture of the King of England and his wife making companionable progresses round the great Jacobean houses, Theobalds, Oatlands, Hatfield, Audley End, Burghley House &c, may need some adjusting.

When Anna followed James south to London, she was supposed to have been politically sterilized. Not allowed to bring her own Scots circle with her, and thus obliged to accept those chosen by James to accompany him to his new capital, she was to be confined to a ceremonial role in places where she had no local attachments. Not so simple, however: what for Anna was deprivation was for ambitious and highly placed Englishwomen hitherto outside the exclusive circle of the Elizabethan Privy Chamber (and by extension their husbands and families) a major opportunity. Anna was supposed to be met and escorted South by a group of English ladies selected for the purpose by the English Privy Council on James’s instructions. In fact, the official group was forestalled by an unofficial one, and it was from these that the new Queen of England constituted her own court.

They were led by Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford, who became the Queen’s particular confidant. She brought with her the late Earl of Essex’s widow, now married to Sir Robert Sidney, brother of the heroic Elizabethan soldier-poet Sir Philip Sidney, who had died of his wounds fighting for the Protestant cause against Spain in the Dutch War of Independence. The Sidneys in turn brought in their Herbert relatives, Earls of Pembroke. Again, we must pass over the details; but what is particularly striking about this group is not only its very extensive association with the arts, letters, music and general intellectual life of the age. It is also how closely it aligns not only with the following of the late Earl of Essex, but also with those who would a generation later form the “Country” opposition to the Court of Charles I during the so-called “Eleven Years’ Tyranny” between 1629 and 1640 – and beyond that with the Parliamentary leadership in the first phases of the Civil War – dubbed by some “The second Essex rebellion” . If we pursued this line further, it would eventually would lead to another soldier, this time for the Cromwellian Republic: Algernon Sidney, whose Thoughts on Government were to make him the first of the American Founding Fathers; executed in 1683 together with William Russell, Lucy’s descendant, for his alleged part in the Rye House Plot against Charles II.

So: have we unearthed a coven of aristocratic republican women and their menfolk already systematically plotting, in the later words of Andrew Marvell’s Horatian Ode on Cromwell’s Return from Ireland, to

“Ruine the Great Worke of Time,
And cast the Kingdome Old
Into another Mold” ?

Not yet; but we have discovered something vitally important about the subsequent history of what historians are now beginning to refer to as “The Monarchical Republic of Elizabeth I”. Two other features will help to bring this into clearer focus.

First, that this Bedford/Essex/Sidney/ Herbert group of Queen Anne’s courtiers was also intimately connected with the continuing formation of her too often forgotten eldest son, Prince Henry, the heir apparent for whom James in the guise of Solomon wrote Basilikon Doron (The Royal Gift), his famous treatise on Kingcraft. Until his untimely death in 1612, aged eighteen, Henry (the name is significant - more so than Arthur in fact), was everything that his younger brother Charles was not.

Second, therefore, that the vision of the group was not that of conspirators bent on revolutionary overthrow. Anything but; these par excellence were the sponsors of the first fully deliberate writing of English nationhood: out of office and distanced from the court of Solomon himself, with its perquisites and patronage-influence, and therefore all the more convinced on principle that they should be in power because their vision of the country was morally better, more honourable, more virtuous, less corrupt and corrupting than those who were enjoying. the fruits of office.

Partly plain English-traditional, but also stoically Roman, this vision found classic voice in Ben Jonson’s great topographical poem “To Penshurst” inspired by Sir Robert Sidney’s country house in Kent, Here, Jonson explicitly contrasts the ancient virtues and qualities of Penshurst and its family as the embodiment of right order with the whited sepulchres of the great new prodigy houses, whose gaudy and shallow novelty showed only the conspicuous product of recent and dubiously gained wealth. These are its opening and closing lines, between which a great deal of the cultural and social history of the next nearly four centuries is mapped out

"Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show
Of touch,* or marble, nor canst boast a row
Of polished pillars, or a roof of gold;
Thou hast no lanthorn, whereof tales are told,
Or stairs, or courts, but stand’st an ancient pile,
And these, grudged at, art reverenced the while
…..
Now, Penshurst, they that will proportion thee
With other edifices, when they see
Those proud ambitious heaps, and nothing else,
May say, their lords have built, but thy lord lives.
* Black marble

[Think of this as you contemplate Bear Mountain or recent rebuildings in the Uplands]

The time has now come, however, to take the short step from the sublime to the ridiculous. After the ideal generosity of Penshurst ,“Where the same beer and bread and self-same wine |That is his Lordship’s shall be also mine” - as open to Ben Jonson, the stepson of a London bricklayer, as to “King James, when hunting late this way, | With his brave son the Prince” [Henry] - what are we to make of this next piece of custard pie slapstick?

This is Sir John Harrington, another member of the Bedford/Essex/Sidney/Herbert group - the Countess of Bedford’s father in fact - describing the goings-on during the visit of Queen Anne’s brother Christian IV in the summer of 1606, quite possibly the most alcoholic Royal Occasion ever, outside the Blackadder antics of Brian Blessed. :---

I came here a day or two before the Danish King came, and from the day he did come until this hour, I have been well nigh overwhelmed with carousal and sports of all kinds. . . .We had women, and indeed wine too, of such plenty as would have astonished each sober beholder. Our feasts were magnificent, and the two royal guests did most lovingly embrace each other at table. I think the Dane hath strangely wrought on our good English nobles; for those, whom I never could get to taste good liquor, now follow the fashion, and wallow in beastly delights. The ladies abandon their sobriety, and are seen to roll about in intoxication. In good sooth the parliament did kindly to provide his Majestie so seasonably with money, for there hath been no lack of good livinge; shews, sights, and banquetings, from morn to eve.

One day, a great feast was held, and, after dinner, the representation of Solomon his Temple and the coming of the Queen of Sheba was made, or (as I may better say) was meant to have been made, before their Majesties, be device of the Earl of Salisbury and others. – But alas! As all earthly things do fail to poor mortals in enjoyment, so did prove our presentment hereof. The Lady who did play the Queen’s part, did carry most precious gifts to both their Majesties; but, forgetting the steppes arising to the canopy, overset her caskets into his Danish Majesties lap, and fell at his feet, tho I rather think it was in his face. Much was the hurry and confusion; cloths and napkins were at hand to make all clean. His Majesty then got up and would dance with the Queen of Sheba, but he fell down and humbled himself before her, and was carried to an inner cchamber and laid on a bed of state, which was not a little defiled with the presents of the Queen which had been bestowed on his garments; such as wine, cream, jelly, beverage, cakes, spices, and other good matters. The entertainment and show went forward, and most of the presenters went backward, or fell down, wine did so occupy their upper chambers. Now did enter, in rich dress, Hope, Faith, and Charity: Hope did assay to speak, but wine rendered her endeavours so feeble that she withdrew, and hoped the King would excuse her brevity: Faith was then all alone, for I am certain she was not joyned with good works, and left the court in a staggering condition. Charity came to the King’s feet, and seemed to cover the multitude of sins her sisters had committed; in some sorte she made obeysance and brought giftes, but said she would return home again, as there was no gift which heaven had not already given his Majesty. She then returned to Hope and Faith, who were both sick and spewing in the lower hall. Next came Victory, in bright armour, and presented a rich sword to the King, who did not accept it, but put it by with his hand; and she, by a strange medley of versification, did endeavour to make suit to the King. But Victory did not triumph long; for, after much lamentable utterance, she was led away like a silly captive, and laid to sleep in the outer steps of the ante-chamber. Now did Peace make entry, and strive to get foremost to the King; but I grieve to tell how great wrath she did discover unto those of her attendance; and, much contrary to her semblance, most rudely made war with her olive branch, and laid on the pates of those who did oppose her coming.

I have much marvelled at these strange pageantries, and they do bring to my remembrance what passed of this sort in our Queen’s days: of which I was sometime an humble presenter and assistant; but I ne’er did see such lack of good order, discretion, and sobriety, as I now have done. . . .The great ladies do go well masked, and indeed it is the only show of their modesty, to conceal their countenance; but alack, they meet with such countenance to uphold their strange doings, that I marvel not at ought that happens. . . .I do often say (but not aloud) that the Danes have again conquered the Britains, for I see no man, or woman either, that can now command himself or herself. I wish I was at home –O rus, quando te aspiciam?

 

At one level, we can take that with a substantial pinch of salt. Though usually remembered now for inventing the water closet, Sir John Harrington, “Boye Jack”, or “that witty fellow my Godson” as Queen Elizabeth used to call him, had a reputation as a Rabelaisian leg-puller; a real life Blackadder in fact, and thus one whose sardonic debunking speaks directly our own post-monarchic and quasi-democratical iconoclasm. Besides, Salisbury, the deviser of these “rich doings”, was the elder brother of Sir Robert Cecil, the King’s principal secretary (fondly, his “little beagle”) and leader of his Privy Council. To cut a few corners, then, it would be fair to say that this “farcsque (to coin a word) was a production of the rival “Firm”.

Joking aside, however, Harrington was voicing something more serious. O rus, quando te aspiciam”- “O Country, when shall I behold thee?” - wasn’t a new sentiment. Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542), the courtier-poet who brought Italian sonnet-form to England and briefly aspired to court Ann Boleyn (“Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind”) before he understood that “. . . Graven with diamonds in letters plain | There is written her fair neck round about: | Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am, | And wild for to hold though I seem tame”, had long ago told a friend of his relief at escaping from Henry VIII’s court, back to “Kent and Christendom”.

What this points to, is that that there was never a single Platonic “Masque of Stuart Culture”; rather there were several different ones going on at the same time, more often than not at cross purposes. The politics and culture of Jacobean and Caroline England used to be called “The High Road to Civil War”. They were anything but: neither the heroic resistance and final victory of Constitutional Liberty over the Divine Right Tyranny (the good old 19th century story), nor the Marxist formula of the revolutionary overthrow of decrepit Feudalism by the inevitable advance of bourgeois capitalism. They were, even up to January1642, when relations between Charles I and the Long Parliament finally broke down irretrievably, those of a fight within the same family – always the most intense and incomprehensible to outsiders- whose various members finished by shouting incomprehensibly past each other about the same things: things in which they all profoundly believed, but no longer understood in the same way.

“The Mental World of the Jacobean Court”, then, was not a closed one. “Solomon” as James titled himself, and “all his Glory” were at a political, social, economic and cultural crossroads. Full of milk and honey though it may have seemed after threadbare Scotland, his new realm was systematically underfinanced (Elizabeth’s most serious failing) and chronically in debt, bled white by war and nearly ten years of rebellion in Ireland. The great windfall realized by the Dissolution of the Medieval Monasteries had long since leaked away into the hands of private landholders and speculators, and this had been followed by further massive liquidation of Crown assets, and with them huge transfer of ultimate power away from the crown. This had also produced a largely parvenu aristocracy: “Where?”, asked Sir Ranulf Chester, one of the King’s Justices, lamenting the disappearance of the ancient names, c. 1620: “Where is Mortimer, Where’s Mowbray, Where is Bohun.? Nay, what is more and most of all, Where is Plantagenet? They are entombed in the urns and sepulchres of mortality” Most of the names I have mentioned were new, some very much so, precarious in their roles and their values. This was the more so, because behind all these aspects lay the larger environmental and ecological impacts of dearth and disease (especially in the 1590s and 1620s), and the systemic erosion of the landed foundations of ancient nobility by long term price inflation, fundamentally driven by population growth as demographic recovery from the Black Death, slow and sporadic at first, now accelerated towards its Malthusian maximum. That in turn had other results as the beginnings of agricultural response produced the uprooting of local populations – the phenomenon of the “masterless man” – the labouring poor made visible – and not least the phenomenal growth of London, from c 60,000 c 1500, approaching its first quarter million by James’s accession: mercantile and financial “Capital” perhaps, but also a precursor of shanty town Mexico City or Calcutta as migrants flooded into its outer parishes. The final factor, both culturally and politically the most apparent, was the fragility of the European situation and England’s position in it: poised on the knife edge between Reformation and Counterreformation, but for the present relatively becalmed in what came to be called “the twelve years’ truce”, between the end of the Dutch War of Independence in the United Provinces in 1604-5 and the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War in 1617. It was this brief “long weekend” of relative peace (compare 1919-39) which saw the beginnings of the Grand Tour. For the first time in generations, well born and educated young Englishmen could cross the Channel, not to fight but to sightsee. Their reactions, and those of their contemporaries when they returned, either bowled over by what they saw and heard or deeply suspicious, but either way profoundly affected, bring us back to the cultural crossroads.

There is another set of descriptions which is worth comparing with Sir John Harrington’s to round this out – of “Pleasure Reconciled by Virtue” on 12th Night 1618, by Jonson and Inigo Jones, starring Prince Charles as chief masquer.:-

First, two extracts from the State Papers, Domestic:

Sir Edward Harwood to Sir Dudley Carleton, 7 January 1618

. . .the last nighte being twelfth nighte was the Masque, the Antimasque being of little boyes dressed like bottells & a man in a greate tonne which the bottells drew out & tost too & froe, not ill liked; the masque it self not well liked, the Conceit good, the poetry not soe; the Ambassador of Spayne & the Venetian ambassador were at it, the frenche not. . .

 

Nathaniel Brent to Carleton, 10 January 1618

. . .The maske on 12th night is not commended of any; ye poet [Ben Jonson] is growne so dul yt his device is not worth ye relating, much lessed ye copiing out; divers thinke fit he should returne to his ould trade of bricke laying againe. The actors were ye Prince, Marquis Buckinghame and Marquis Haelton, ye Earle of Montgomery, two of ye Lord Treasurer’s boys and others of lesser folk, to make them twelve. The Queen hath so absolutely kept in all this Christmas yt she was not present at it though she were at Whitehall.

 

And a much longer account by one Horatio Busino, chaplain to the Venetian ambassador.

Of the masques, the most famous of all is performed on the morrow of the feast of the three Wise Men according to an ancient custom of the palace here. A large hall is fitted up like a theatre, with well secured boxes all round. The stage is at one end and His Majesty’s chair in front under an ample canopy. Near him are stools for the foreign ambassadors. On the 16th of the current month of January, his Excellency was invited to see a representation and masque, . . .the chief performer being the king’s own son and heir, the prince of Wales, now seventeen years old, an agile youth, handsome and very graceful. [This was Charles, not Henry, and Busino was gilding the lily. Having done so, he went on to Inigo Jones’s Doric and Ionic stage set, and then to the costume of the numerous “most noble and richly arrayed ladies”, the splendour of whose “diamonds and other jewels was so brilliant that they looked like so many stars. During the two hours of waiting we had leisure [yawn] to examine them again and again . . . .[and – yawn – again]. The dress peculiar to these ladies is very handsome for those who like it, and profits some of them as a blind to nature’s defects [being draped from the shoulders] so that any deformity, however monstrous, remains hidden. The farthingale also plays its part. The plump and buxom display their bosoms very liberally, and those who are lean to muffled up to the throat. All wear men’s shoes or at least very low slippers. They consider the mask as indispensable for their face as bread at table, but they lay it aside very willingly at these publice entertainments.

[Eventually James enters, to the sound of “a sort of recitative” on some 15-20 cornets and trumpets; the ambassadors and great officers of the realm and law take their seats in due precendence; the Lord Chamberlain clears the theatre; painted scenes unfold to reveal Mount Atlas, “whose enormous head was alone visible up aloft under the very roof of the theatre; it rolled up its eyes and moved itself very cleverly”. After the anti-masque – some “mummeries” featuring “a very chubby Bacchus” in a chariot; “another stout individual on foot” rolling about as if drunk, representing Bacchus’s cupbearer; and twelve figures kitted out like wicker chianti bottles; Hercules wrestling with Antaeus; and a chorus of twelve frogs – Mercury accounces the Masque proper.]

After him came a guitar player in a gown, who sang some trills, accompanying himself with his instrument. He announced himself as some deity, and then a number of singers, dressed in long red gowns to represent high priests, came to the stage, wearing gilt mitres. In the midst of them was a goddess in a long white robe and they sang some jigs which we did not understand. It is true that, spoiled as we are by the graceful and harmonious music of Italy, the composition did not strike us as very fine. [After this, twelve masked and plumed “cavaliers” and their ladies performed “every sort of ballet and dance of every country whatsoever”. Beginning in very good time, preserving a pyramidical figure with the Prince at its apex through various complex evolutions, they eventually got tired.]

Last of all they danced the Spanish dance, one at a time, each with his lady, and being well nigh tired, they began to lag, whereupon the King, who is naturally choleric, got impatient and shouted out aloud “Why don’t they dance? What did they make me come here for? Devil take you all, dance.” Upon this, the Marquis of Buckingham, his majesty’s favourite, immediately sprang forward, cutting a score of lofty and very minute capers, with so much grace and agility that he not only appeased the ire of his angry lord, but rendered himself the admiration and delight of everybody. . . . .The prince however excelled them all in bowing . . .

The king now rose from his chair, took the ambassadors along with him, and after passing through a number of chambers and galleries, he reached a hall where the usual collation was spread for the performers; a light being carried before him. After he had glanced all round the table he departed, and forthwith the parties concerned pounced upon the prey like so many harpies. . .The story ended at half past two in the morning, and half disgusted and weary we returned home.

Should your lordships [the Supreme Council of the Venetian Republic] writhe on reading or listening to this document, you may imagine the weariness I feel in relating it.

More decorous that the “rich doings” of 1606 perhaps- but not much; and it is clear that Busino’s tongue was firmly in his cheek throughout. Elements of the Jacobean masque had a long afterlife of course. As King, Charles I and his French Queen Henrietta Maria tried hard to revive, if not its specific forms, then more broadly the notion of their realms culture as a whole as that of a single, solemn masque; there are even a few examples of Cromwellian masque under the Protectorate (He had after all to maintain his State on the European stage). Further on, one thinks perhaps of Henry Purcell’s Court Odes, or of his King Arthur, or the British Worthy of 1691, adapted from John Dryden’s original libretto of 1684 to fit William and Mary rather than Charles II; of Handel’s very conspicuous referral back to the Solomon theme in his Coronation Anthems for George II in 1727; of Mozart’s Magic Flute, more Masque than Opera, especially in its Masonic symbolism – ever perhaps of the present Coronation service itself, a concoction from earlier sources devised for that of Edward VII in 1901.

In 1618, however, the gilt was coming off the gingerbread and the wheels off the chariot. Prince Henry was six years dead, so too was Sir Robert Cecil ; in the meantime, Solomon’s court had been disfigured by the sexual scandal (Gomery seems tame by comparison) surrounding the annulment on grounds of impotence (witchcraft-induced?) of the childhood marriage of Elizabeth Howard to the son of Robert Devereux, the executed Earl of Essex, and the murder by poison of Sir Thomas Overbury, master of her household, but chief obstacle to her affair with Robert Carr, the King’s first favourite, Against a background of mounting mistrust, the arrangements and relationships by which Cecil had contrived to keep Crown and Parliament in some sort of step had broken down completely. Since Parliament had not met since 1613, and not effectively since 1610, the country was running on dubious financial manipulations and “private” partnerships with prominent courtiers. As J.M. Keynes was later to say of such situations, “in some circumstances, corruption is the cheapest form of government”. When Parliament did meet again, in 1620, it seemed to be intent on dealing with this by reviving the ancient procedure of impeachment, not used since the 15th century, to punish those responsible. Though they were rhetorically dressed up to look like zeal for England’s ancient liberties, these proceedings turned out to be little more than court vendettas pursued through factional manipulation, using the Commons as a sounding board. Thus did the country take its first steps along the low and accidental road to Civil War.

Let me end, then with a fitting epitaph. From 1612, the year of Prince Henry’s and Sir Robert Cecil’s death, this is Orlando Gibbons, “The Silver Swan”, among the best and best known of English madrigals:

The Silver Swan, who living had no note,
When death approached unlocked her silent throat.
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more.
Farewell all joys, O death come close mine eyes;
More Geese than Swans now live,
More fools than wise.

A note on sources. Out of an oceanic literature, see:-

On Jacobean and Caroline culture, Linda Levy Peck ed., The Mental World of the Jacobean Court 1991); Kevin Sharpe:- Criticism and Compliment (1987); The Personal Rule of Charles I (1992); Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (edited with Peter Lake, 1994), and Remapping Early Modern England: the Culture of Seventeenth Century Politics (2000).

On the “low” road to civil war, Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (1990) and The Fall of the British Monarchies (1991)

The excerpts are from D.H. Willson, ed., James I by his Contemporaries