Abstract
Writing of the Civil War the Earl of Clarendon puzzled how ‘a small discernible cloud’ that ‘arose in the north’ could have disrupted the ‘blessed conjuncture’ of the Caroline peace with ‘such a storm that never gave over raging … until it had rooted up the greatest and tallest cedars of the three nations’.1 Others were less surprised: as early as 1626 the Earl of Arundel had reportedly questioned whether Charles could avoid seeing his ‘house overturned’.2 Indeed, by the late 1620s Charles’ early bellicosity collapsed in a humiliating withdrawal from European warfare and concluded in a series of political and personal crises including the suspension of Parliament in 1629.
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Notes
Edward Hyde, ZZZSelections from the History of the Rebellion and the Life of Himself, ed. G. Huehns and Hugh Trevor-Roper (Oxford: Oxford University, 1978), p. 83.
Malcolm Smuts, ‘Force, Love and Authority in Caroline Political Culture’, in The 1630s: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Ian Atherton and Julie Sanders (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 28–49, p. 33.
Philip Finkelpearl, John Marston of the Middle Temple: An Elizabethan Dramatist in his Social Setting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 1–5, describes the City lawyers as ‘the largest single group of literate and cultured men in London’, possessing a distinctive masquing culture which did, at key points, express disquiet with official policy. See also Chapter 4 (p. 116).
They also mark Henrietta Maria’s political interventions: see Julie Sanders, ‘Caroline Salon Culture and Female Agency: The Countess of Carlisle, Henrietta Maria, and Public Theatre’, Theatre Journal, 52 (2000), 449–64,
and Karen Britland, ‘“All emulation cease, and jars”: Political Possibilities in Chloridia, Queen Henrietta Maria’s Masque of 1631’, Ben Jonson Journal, 9 (2000), 1–22.
Whitelocke, Memorials, sig. D2v. Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 1.64–6, illustrate the confusions about this narrative, noting the rather obvious nature of the ‘covert’ message and the involvement of the monopoly-defending lawyer, Noy. They also describe the organising committee in terms of left/right politics while admitting that the implications of Charles’ policies were not clear in 1633; see Martin Butler, ‘Politics and the Masque: The Triumph of Peace’, The Seventeenth Century, 2 (1987), 117–41, pp. 118–19 and 122.
Recent studies of The Triumph of Peace have stressed its negotiation with critical voices either as a ‘tactful but firm caution about the necessity of the constraints of legality’ restrained by genre and occasion (Butler, ‘Politics and the Masque: The Triumph of Peace’, p. 122), or as more formally transgressive but despite ‘criticism of particular royal policies’ broadly aligned with loyalty to the Crown (see Kevin Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 212–23, esp. p. 222). For Sharpe, the involvement of numerous critics of the Crown, without damage to their later careers, justifies his defence of Caroline court culture as open, various, flexible, and responsive.
Compare L. Bryant, ‘From Communal Ritual to Royal Spectacle’, in French Ceremonial Entries in the Sixteenth Century: Event, Image, Text, ed. N. Russell and H. Vissentin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), pp. 207–45, p. 208, on how entry rituals dramatise and spatialise competing civic and court spheres.
W. W. Greg, ‘The Triumph of Peace. A Bibliographer’s Nightmare’, The Library, 5th ser., 1 (1946), 113–26, and ‘The Text’, in A Book of Masques, pp. 306–7.
Murray Lefkowitz, ‘The Longleat Papers of Bulstrode Whitelocke: New Light on Shirley’s Triumph of Peace’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 18 (1965), 42–60.
The masque was also reported in the Venetian ambassador’s dispatches, and received a special entry in the Gazette de France, 9 March 1634, including a long description of the procession. It was also the only masque text that has been traced to the Bibliothèque du Roi: see Mare-Claude Canova-Green, La Politique-spectacle au grand siècle: les rapports franco-anglais (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1993), p. 176.
The descriptions suggest the influence of the pseudo-Rabelaisian text Les Songes Drolatiques (1565): see Canova-Green, La Politique-spectacle au grand siècle, pp. 246–7, and Anne Lake Prescott, ‘The Stuart Masque and Pantagruel’s Dreams’, English Literary History, 51 (1984), 407–30.
BL Harleian MS 1026, fol. 50–50v, commonplace book of Justinian Pagitt. This letter is usually cited from John Payne Collier’s The history of English dramatic poetry to the time of Shakespeare, and Annals of the stage to the restoration, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1831), 2.60–1 (as in M. Lefkowitz, Trois Masques à la Cour de Charles Ier d’Angleterre (Paris: CNRS, 1970), p. 39), where a partial transcription is offered. Pagitt (1612–68) was a lawyer based in the Middle Temple with musical interests (see ODNB, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/66665?docPos=3); his commonplace book mixes letter drafts, sermon notes and instructions on deportment while dancing.
See also Wilfrid Prest, The Inns of Court, 1590–1640 (London: Longman,1972), pp. 162–4.
William Whiteway, ‘Diary’, 3 Feb 1634 in BL MS Egerton 784, cited in McGee, ‘“Strangest Consequence from Remotest Cause”: The Second Performance of The Triumph of Peace’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 5 (1991), 309–42, pp. 320–1. Whiteway’s dating is confirmed by Sir Humphrey Mildmay’s diary, by Justinian Pagitt’s letter, by The Diary of Sir Richard Hutton 1614–1639, ed. W. R. Prest (London: Selden Society, 1991), p. 96, and by Herbert’s documents that change the date from 2 to 3 February: JCS, 5.1156–7. Bentley notes Herbert’s altered dating as ‘an error’, although there may have been earlier negotiations about the masque: Garrard reported to Wentworth (6 December 1633) that it was planned for Twelfth Night (see The Earl of Strafford’s letters and despatches, with an essay towards his life by Sir G. Radcliffe, ed. W. Knowler, 2 vols. (1740), 1.167).
Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400– 1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 197; and The Elizabethan Prayerbook, cited in C. Hassel, Renaissance Drama and the English Church Year (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), p. 95. The feast also marked the presentation of Christ at the Temple (and was associated with the story of Simeon and with the ‘Nunc dimittis’). 34. The Queen’s Capuchin chapel at St James, devoted to the Virgin Mary, had been opened in 1632:
see Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 92–109, esp. pp. 95 and 106.
On Candlemas Day Charles offered seven nobles instead of the usual one: see K. Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 219.
Johan P. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–40 (Harlow: Longman, 1986), pp. 64–6,
and Roy Strong, Coronation: A History of Kingship and the British Monarchy (London: HarperCollins, 2005), 238–40. At the time the Venetian ambassador reported, ‘people talk of the possibility of his Majesty not being crowned, so as to remain more absolute, avoiding the obligation to swear to the laws’ (CSPV, 1625–1626, p. 51).
Plutarch, ‘The Fortunes of Rome’, in Selected Essays and Dialogues, ed. D. Russell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 133. Numa’s reign was supposed to have lasted forty-three years.
John Peacock, The Stage Designs of Inigo Jones: The European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1995), pp. 92–3.
Edmund Spenser, ZZZThe Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (Harlow: Longman, 2001), 7.7.43 (5–8).
B. Ravelhofer, ‘“Virgin Wax” and “Hairy Men-Monsters”: Unstable Movement Codes in the Stuart Masque’, in The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, ed. David Bevington and Peter Holbrook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 244–72 (pp. 261–4).
H. Langelüddecke, ‘“The chiefest strength and glory of this kingdom’: Arming and Training the “Perfect Militia” in the 1630s’, English Historical Review, 118 (2003), 1264–1303.
Roy Strong, Van Dyck: Charles I on Horseback (London: Viking, 1972), pp. 59–63.
Anon, ‘Now did heaven’s charioteer’, cited in M. B. Pickel, Charles I as Patron of Poetry and Drama (London: F. Muller, 1936). The poem also appears in a copy in the state papers (NA, SP16/260/14) and in three other poetic miscellanies (BL MS Add 33998, fols. 64v–65r; Rosenbach Library, Philadelphia, MS 232/14, pp. 46–7; Yale, Osborn Collection, MS b 200, pp. 119–20).
J. Knowles, ‘“In the purest times of peerless Queen Elizabeth”: Nostalgia, Politics, and Jonson’s Use of the 1575 Kenilworth Entertainments’, in The Progresses, Pageants, and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I, ed. Jayne Archer, Elizabeth Goldring, and Sarah Knight (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 247–67, pp. 265–6
Indeed, in 1633 Charles travelled by carriage rather than on horseback, and his ‘privatised’ mode of transport seemed to some to defeat the purpose of royal ceremony: see Mark Brayshay, ‘Long-Distance Royal Journeys: Anne of Denmark’s Journey from Stirling to Windsor in 1603’, Journal of Transport History, 25 (2004), 1–21, p. 17, and my essay cited below.
They were also described by Vasari and Serlio: see Andrew Martindale, The Triumphs of Caesar by Andrea Mantegna in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Hampton Court (London: Harvey Miller, 1979), p. 97. Martindale notes that a small copy by Rubens, ‘Scenes from a Roman Triumph’, c.1630, also survives in the National Gallery (p. 107).
C 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, 1991), pp. 118–56, p. 134. My reading of Albion’s Triumph is much influenced by Professor Butler’s reading and by John Peacock’s ‘The Image of Charles I as a Roman Emperor’ (see note 19 above).
John R. Elliott Jr., ‘The Folger Manuscript of The Triumph of Peace Procession’, English Manuscript Studies, 3 (1992), 193–215, p. 198.
Dayrell, sometimes spelt Darrell or Dorell (of Lillingstone Dayrell, Buckinghamshire), later served as a royalist officer and was knighted in 1634 (see W. A. Shaw, The Knights of England, 2 vols. (London: Sherratt and Hughes, 1906), 2.202;
E. Dayrell, The History of the Dayrells of Lillingstone Dayrell (Jersey: Le Lievre Bros, 1885), p. 31). His appearance in the masque features on his tombstone in the parish church: he was chosen for his ‘comeliness of person’.
John Harris and Gordon Higgott, Inigo Jones: Complete Architectural Drawings (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1989).
For the lost publications, see D. S. Collins, A Handlist of News Pamphlets, 1590–1610 (London: South-West Essex Technical College, 1943), pp. 114–15.
Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 144.
See Jean Fuzier, ‘English Political Dialogues 1641–1651: A Suggestion for Research with a Critical Edition of The Tragedy of the Cruell Warre (1643)’, Cahiers Elisabéthains, 14 (1977), 49–68. Quotations are taken from this edition.
It assigns its production as ‘Printed in the year of the Cavaliers’ cruelty’. Lois Potter, ‘The Triumph of Peace and The Cruel War: Masque and Parody’, Notes and Queries, 27 (1980), 345–8, argues that this blurring shows how the masque is misunderstood, but for all its crudeness, The Cruel War echoes a common trope in civil war journalism that comedy has become tragedy and masques have now ushered in antimasques.
Susan Wiseman, Drama and Politics in the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 119.
Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Maid’s Tragedy, 1.1.41–2 in The Dramatic Works of the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, ed. F. Bowers, 10 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 2.30.
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Knowles, J. (2015). ‘’Tis for kings, / Not for their subjects, to have such rare things’: The Triumph of Peace and Civil Culture. In: Politics and Political Culture in the Court Masque. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137432018_6
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