Abstract
Until Charles I found himself fighting a civil war, the Stuart kings showed little enthusiasm or aptitude for the martial virtues. James I made peace with Spain, and in his monarchical self-presentation adopted the Erasmian model of rex pacificus. Charles I began his reign with naval campaigns against Spain and France, after which inauspicious ventures England played little part in the military affairs of Europe. Both James and Charles, and their adherents, nevertheless cultivated the triumph, translating its martial discourse into terms compatible with their policies.1 For their part, Protestant militants continued, as under Elizabeth, to assert their alternative policies and to criticize royal inactivity by recuperating the triumph. The first decade of James’s reign abounds in complimentary triumphs of peace, magnificence, and wisdom; only a few writers used the triumph to urge the King to combat the papist enemy. Admonition became sharper with the tensions of the 1610s. In 1612 England joined the Protestant Union, and in 1613 James’s daughter married the Protestant Elector Palatine, developments that James sought to balance by a renewed opening to Spain. Protestant enthusiasts, however, saw England again taking its place in an alliance against the Hapsburg foe. They expressed their hopes and their urgings through literary triumphs for James’s heirs and for the heroes of the continental wars.
‘to vanquish… all the answerers of the worlde’
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Notes
For the ‘triumphalism’ of the Stuart Banqueting House, see Per Palme, Triumph of Peace: a Study of the Whitehall Banqueting House (London: Thames and Hudson, 1957) pp. 124–8.
For the paucity of public, as distinct from court, ceremonies under Charles I, see Malcolm Smuts, ‘The Political Failure of Stuart Cultural Patronage’, in Patronage in the Renaissance, ed. Guy Fitch Lytle and Stephen Orgel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 165–87.
Among many studies, see David M. Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry 1558–1642 (Columbia SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1971), pp. 71–89;
Graham Parry, The Golden Age Restor’d: the Culture of the Stuart Court, 1603–42 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981), pp. 1–21.
As King of Scotland, James the poet had won him a ‘secund Croune’ of laurel that ‘dois bring / Moir hich triumphe’ than his ‘Croune Imperiale’: ‘To His Maiestie the Day of His Coronation with Laurell’, ll. 7–8, in Poems of John Stewart of Baldyneiss, ed. Thomas Crockett (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1912–13).
The iconography described by Marcelline appears on the title page of his book, and in the statue at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, where the enthroned James holds a book in each hand: cf. David Howarth, Images of Rule: Art and Politics in the English Renaissance, 1485–1649 (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press-now Palgrave, 1997), pp. 120–2.
See W.B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 31–123.
Thomas Dekker, The Magnificent Entertainment: Given to King James, ll. 698–9, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers and Cyrus Hoy, 6 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953–74), vol. II.
Samuel R. Gardiner, History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War, 3rd edn, 10 vols (London: Longmans, Green, 1889), vol. II, pp. 161–3;
David Norbrook, ‘The Masque of Truth: Court Entertainments and International Protestant Politics in the Early Stuart Period’, Seventeenth Century, 1 (1986), 81–110.
Peacham, Prince Henrie revived (1615), ll. 592–603. On Henry, Prince of Wales, see Roy Strong, Henry Prince of Wales and England’s Lost Renaissance (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), pp. 71–85;
J.R. Mulryne, ‘“Here’s Unfortunate Revels”: War and Chivalry in Plays and Shows at the Time of Prince Henry Stuart’, in War, Literature and the Arts in Sixteenth-Century Europe, ed. J.R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press — now Palgrave, 1989), pp. 165–89. Peacham, like Gell, visited Heidelberg, and he was present with the continental army of Sir John Ogle in 1613–14.
Peacham may allude to Cornelius Vroom’s Armada tapestries, bought by James I in 1616: J.S.A. Adamson, ‘Chivalry and Political Culture in Caroline England’, in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press — now Palgrave, 1993), p. 173.
Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 244–7, 405–7.
L.J. Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 9–57;
Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Reign of Charles I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 3–70.
Laude, The Scottish souldier (Edinburgh, 1629), ll. 320–4. Buckingham was assassinated in August 1628, raising hopes of peace with France and a concentration on war with Spain. Peace with France was concluded in April 1629, with Spain in December 1629. Lauder’s poem may have been published in the middle of the year, when negotiations with Spain were at an impasse. On Buckingham’s style, see Roger Lockyer, Buckingham (London: Longman, 1981), pp. 20, 236, 470.
Andrew Martindale, The Triumphs of Caesar by Andrea Mantegna (London: Harvey Miller, 1979), pp. 56–74, 134, 159, 171–2.
Oliver Millar, Van Dyck in England (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1982), pp. 50–2;
Gardiner, History of England, vol. VIII, pp. 269–81; Sharpe, Personal Rule, pp. 717–30; Martin Butler, ‘Reform or Reverence? The Politics of the Caroline Masque’, in Theatre and Government under the Early Stuarts, ed. J.R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 146–51.
Albion’s Triumph, l. 131, in Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones: the Theatre of the Stuart Court, 2 vols. (London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1973), vol. II.
On the Roman-English continuity, see Jerzy Limon, The Masque of Stuart Culture (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), pp. 82–5.
See Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones, vol. I, p. 61; Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 177–8.
For poetic treatments of Gustavus, see James Loxley, Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars: the Drawn Sword (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press — now Palgrave, 1997), pp. 23–7.
‘Elegy on the death of the King of Sweden’, ll. 33–40, in The Poems and Masques of Aurelian Townshend, ed. Cedric C. Brown (Reading: Whiteknights Press, 1983);
Kevin Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: the Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 173–6; Loxley, Royalism and Poetry, pp. 25–7.
See also Butler, ‘Politics of the Caroline Masque’, pp. 133–7. On the ways in which royal authority was ‘negotiated rather than simply affirmed’ in Stuart masques, see Butler, ‘Courtly Negotiations’, in The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, ed. David Bevington and Peter Holbrook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 20–40;
for a persuasive treatment of war, peace and ‘Platonic politics’ in the 1630s, see R. Malcolm Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), pp. 247–62.
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© 2001 Anthony Miller
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Miller, A. (2001). The Stuart Peace. In: Roman Triumphs and Early Modern English Culture. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230628557_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230628557_6
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