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Politics and the Masque: The Triumph of Peace

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SOURCE: Butler, Martin. “Politics and the Masque: The Triumph of Peace.The Seventeenth Century 2, no. 2 (July 1987): 117-41.

[In the following essay, Butler challenges the notion that Caroline masques were merely dramatic spectacles, arguing instead that court masques were one aspect of Charles I's government by consensus. Focusing on Shirley's Triumph of Peace, Butler analyzes how the production of a masque can generate multiple political meanings.]

Recent years have seen much important and suggestive work on the court masque under the early Stuarts. The conditions that generated the masque have been fully documented and, especially, the function of the form as a vehicle of political statement is much better understood than in the past; the masque no longer seems to be inflated flattery but a complex fusion of counsel and compliment. A great deal of this work has come together in the books of Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, particularly in their sumptuous joint enterprise, Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court.1 However, a number of significant misconceptions remain, particularly in relation to the 1630s, a decade that was a culmination in every sense, artistic and political.

In particular, in spite of a widespread acknowledgement of the very considerable political capital that the masques provided, a tendency still remains to write down the court festivals of the 1630s as, in the long run, a kind of escapism; for all the substantial sophistication of their achievement, in the retrospective illumination of 1642 the masques still seem a distraction, naively over-confident, inevitably doomed. This is a view which powerfully colours the introduction to Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court, where the masques are presented against a background of political dissent and fragmentation which they themselves were helping to create. As England polarized steadily into court and country so, we are told, the masques could only be a ‘profound irrelevance’. In the context of the approaching civil war, the illusions in which the masques traded became ironically precise symbols of the position of the crown: Charles I's Star Chamber decrees were ‘as unreal as Inigo Jones's victory over gravity’ (I, 72, 75). The same note is heard even more insistently in Roy Strong's chapter on Caroline culture in his Splendour at Court,2 in which the Caroline masques are seen as ‘little more than a postponement of disastrous troubles to come’ (p.233). Charles placed much confidence in ‘the effect of these spectacles in staving off the oncoming tide of disaster’ (p.241), but the ‘illusion of control’ (p.219) which they allowed was belied by the actuality; Charles was left with only ‘extravagant assertions of a mirage of power’, while those who danced with him now seem not a little ‘pathetic’, or ‘faintly comic’ (pp.247-48). This view of the Caroline masque continues in Graham Parry's The Golden Age Restor'd,3 in which the decade's masquing is said to culminate in ‘the hollow symbolism of pretended victories’; the ‘essential divinity of kings is confirmed’, but only to the satisfaction of ‘the enclosed world of the court’ (pp.201-02).

Plainly, there is a contradiction here which has been only partially confronted. High claims are being advanced for the cultural importance of the court masque yet these are simultaneously contradicted by the political failure which the masque is assumed to have encouraged: the form is being represented as at once hermetically closed and incapable of closure. This contradiction in the masque form is repeated at the level of masque commentary: a considerable amount of Orgel and Strong's energies has gone into investigating the intellectual contexts of the masque, yet at the end of the day the form is still not granted full intellectual seriousness, but left very much as Francis Bacon dismissed it, an expensive toy.

A major problem here is the retrospective focus of much writing on the masque. For Orgel and Strong, the masque is symbolic of royal myopia before the civil war: Charles dances heedless of the political deterioration around him. The limitations of the masque form are coded into the exclusiveness of the court event: if the court was only talking to itself and only telling itself what it wanted to hear, little wonder that the political collapse at the end of the decade should have been so absolute. Clearly there is a great deal of truth in this position. The narrowness of the court's cultural sympathies goes a long way towards explaining the feelings of alienation from the court which became possible in the 1640s, while the magical transformations and sudden transitions of masque staging were designed to underpin an ideology of innate royal authority which could not survive a general loss of confidence in the crown. And yet the perception of these ironies depends on the prior historical assumption that such a loss of confidence was indeed going inevitably to come about, that England in the 1630s was already embarked on a ‘highroad to civil war’4 that had only one destination. Obviously, one of the factors that is operating here is a simple difficulty of historical perspective: it is impossible for us to erase our foreknowledge that the Caroline regime, for all its large pretensions, was not going to survive beyond 1642. But what also seems to be present in the language with which Orgel and Strong criticize the political inadequacies of the masque is a logical circularity which sounds suspiciously Whiggish and teleological: the masque was seeking to promulgate royal power; royal power was on the brink of collapse; therefore, the masque was ineffective and ‘irrelevant’.

I have elsewhere expatiated at length on the dangers of an ‘ex post facto’ reading of the literature of the 1630s;5 it is rather surprising (in view of the opinions quoted above) to find that so too has Roy Strong.6 What is more to the point is that a large gap has long been present between perceptions of the decade in the minds of historians of politics and historians of the masque.7 The historical model that underlies Orgel and Strong's accounts represents the 1630s as a single and accelerating divide between the crown and the crown's ‘opponents’, in which the court becomes increasingly embattled and isolated, marginalized by the steady advance of more powerful political forces. Against this background the masque is inevitably going to look fragile. But political historians have not represented the decade quite like this for some time; indeed, there is some justice in thinking of Charles in 1630 as being on the offensive, rather than in a posture of defence. One estimate goes like this:8 after the fiasco of the 1629 parliament, Charles (who had begun his reign by doggedly holding four parliaments in five years) went into the 1630s intent on exploring such other options as were open to him. There ensued an attempt to tighten up government efficiency and consolidate the crown's fiscal powers. The privy council became the linch-pin of royal government and its business multiplied; the gentry were chivvied back to their roles as local governors; a stream of proclamations regulating all aspects of life began to issue from Whitehall. Finance was raised through channels that did not require parliamentary consent; by maintaining a non-interventionist posture on foreign affairs Charles avoided a prime burden that would seriously have strained his resources. Far from disappearing beneath a tide of ‘opposition’, Charles was endeavouring to adopt a style of government all too familiar from the other European monarchies, where parliaments were giving place to modern bureaucratic absolutisms. And simultaneous with this attempt to promote ‘an ambitious renovation in church and state’9 led by the court and depending on ideals of order, discipline and deference, there was developed a programme of masques, performed before an invited audience drawn from the political élites, to promulgate the wisdom, justice and stability of Stuart government, and to proclaim the value of peace in a Europe that everywhere else was being ruined by war. The masques may have idealized Charles's achievements but this alone does not make them ‘escapist’. Rather, they were the necessary cultural counterpart to the court's attempt to take a radical political initiative.

Now clearly it is important not to underestimate the distrust with which Charles's religious policies and fiscal devices came to be regarded, nor to overstimate the strength of the financial resources to which, without summoning parliament, he was confined.10 His freedom of movement was limited in that he could not afford to take steps which would alienate the political élites on whom he depended for money and support in the provinces (as the fiasco of the Scottish campaigns eventually demonstrated). The Caroline experiment in government promised more than it was finally able to perform, yet for as long as Charles's political élites continued to co-operate with his needs his power was not a mirage. Orgel and Strong represent royal power in such a way as to imply that it was inherently unstable and always destined ultimately to collapse, but while the gentry continued to collect Ship Money the court masques dramatized an ideology focussed on Whitehall that was daily being turned into political action.

A second problem with Orgel and Strong's position is that it represents early Stuart politics almost exclusively in terms of conflict. Modern historians, on the other hand, have increasingly come to emphasize that Caroline government rested on principles of consensus and co-operation, and exploited such channels of communication and ‘points of contact’11 as were open to it. A particularly pointed case of this is posed in Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court by the treatment of Attorney General Noy who had a hand in preparing The Triumph of Peace. Noy, a lawyer, had been prominent in the parliaments of the 1620s for his speeches criticizing the legality of patents and monopolies. Notwithstanding, he was offered the post of Attorney General in 1631 and thereafter his legal skills were employed on developing several of Charles's fiscal devices; the responsibility for Ship Money rests very largely with him. And yet he was involved in planning The Triumph of Peace, a masque which, as Orgel and Strong correctly perceive, is in some senses a critique of those very same devices. I shall be offering my own explanation of these curious ‘facts’ shortly. The reaction of Orgel and Strong is to throw up their hands in horror: ‘Noy was a curious figure, a thoroughgoing opportunist and unabashed turncoat’ to whom Charles had ‘made it clear that it was to his advantage to change his allegiance’ (I, 65). The problem with this comment is that its language projects a politics of conflict on to a situation remarkable for its consensus. Working on the assumption that there were two ‘sides’ in the 1630s and that the royal side was in a state of incipient collapse, Orgel and Strong cannot make sense of Noy except as an outrageous traitor to former loyalties shoring up a shoddy cause. But Noy's career was not an untypical one. We find other honourable men co-operating with the court in the 1630s who had been court critics only a few years before: men like Dudley Digges (arrested for seditious words in the 1626 parliament, proponent of the Petition of Right, then latterly Master of the Rolls) or John Selden (arrested 1629, to be found in 1635 compiling learned arguments in support of Ship Money). In parliament these men had represented themselves as critics of royal policies rather than royal power, and in the absence of parliament they naturally utilized their political skills in the only other way available to them, through the channels of the Caroline experiment in government. Orgel and Strong's accusation that Noy changed his ‘allegiance’ is frankly meaningless; with no parliaments in the 1630s there could be no parliamentary ‘opposition’ for him to betray.12

The consensual basis of Charles's personal government is well seen in the delegation of authority that took place, from privy council to lords lieutenant, to the provincial bench and thence to parish officialdom, but its most remarkable demonstration lies in this body of former court critics who in the 1630s chose actively to work with the court. Some, like John Pym, held minor offices in the localities. Others performed powerful and influential roles at the centre: most famously Thomas Wentworth, future Earl of Strafford, but also smaller men like Digges, Selden and Noy. The resources of loyalty on which the crown could still draw in the 1630s are well seen in Charles's ability to build bridges to people who, in different circumstances, might have been found in ‘opposition’. It is precisely when it became impossible to work with such men, as happened in 1640-42, that Charles's position was rendered critical, and it is no coincidence that this was the historical moment at which the masques ceased to come. My contention in this paper is that the masque too could participate in this politics of consensus. Rather than being read as rearguard actions against an unpalatable ‘reality’, the finest masques can be understood as attempts at finding bridges, between the crown, the crown's supporters, and the crown's critics.

I have no wish to deny the basic truth that the loss of confidence in Charles in 1640 was reflected in, and partly generated by, the limitations of the culture which he sponsored: the masques of 1638-40 which register a consciousness of Charles's political problems in the crisis over the Scots do not embody an adequate response to those difficulties. What I am arguing, however, is that this retrospective consciousness has pervasively skewed understanding of the masques of the preceding years. On the one hand, the masques have not been granted full seriousness as political acts. Though on one level private entertainments, they were on another level spectacles of stage in which king and court together tested, defined, promulgated or outlawed current ideological values which outside the masque were being used to inform acts of power. On the other hand, the complexity with which the masques are sited in respect to social and political relations generally has been considerably underestimated. It is probably true to say that a complete hermeneutics of the masque has still to be written. Briefly, a masque constructs meaning from (at least) four variables: an author, a masquer, an audience, and a monarch. Sometimes the monarch may be the masquer; sometimes he may be, to all intents and purposes, the author. The formal complexities which these four generate are considerable. The masque may be read as a simple statement of royal intent. If the king is the spectator, it may be understood as a reflection of the king's meaning for the sake of the king, or it may be offered to the king as an act of homage or, more interestingly, persuasion. If the king is a masquer, it is possible that he is being made to perform roles which express what it is hoped he would be rather than what he is. Sometimes the audience's perception of the masque's meaning differs from the king's; sometimes the author's perception differs from both of these (as seems to have been the case with Jonson's Masque of Metamorphosed Gipsies).13 Plainly, the meanings available in a masque are limited by the question of tact; it is not going to be possible to present meanings which the king cannot be made to tolerate. But within these limits there is still significant room for manoeuvre, manoeuvring which may have a real political function as an act of rapprochement, appeasement, or finding of ‘points of contact’. The masque text is one corner in a dialogue the other corners of which are the audiences by which the masque is received and appropriated.

II

A text which usefully focuses these strictures is James Shirley's The Triumph of Peace, presented to the king in February 1634 by the gentlemen of the Inns of Court, and notorious for being the most expensive and widely-reported masque of the decade. The Triumph of Peace is useful because it appears to be anomalous: as Orgel and Strong point out, this masque is remarkable for the ‘cautious but unmistakable critiques of Charles's policy’ which it contains (I, 63). Most obviously, there is the antimasque which satirizes six ‘projectors’, racketeers who are seeking to gain from the king grants of monopoly for ludicrous inventions—perpetual motion machines, submarine suits, poultry diets and the like—which they will then operate to the royal profit but also, implicitly, to feather their own nests. This antimasque alludes quite explicitly to some of the more ‘extraordinary courses’ by which Charles was raising finance without parliament; in Bulstrode Whitelocke's account of the masque, the projectors ‘pleased the Spectators the more, because by it an Information was covertly given to the King, of the unfitness and ridiculousness of these Projects against the Law’.14 But more remarkably, the fable of the masque as a whole, performed by representatives of the kingdom's legal profession, was a statement about the dependence of Peace and Justice on the institution of Law, and constituted a tactful but firm caution about the necessity of governments acknowledging the constraints of legality.

The problem with all of this is that the masque represents itself as an act of homage to the king: royal hints had been dropped that after the offence given to the court by the rude remarks about despotic rulers in Histriomastix (1633), written by the lawyer William Prynne and dedicated to the Inns of Court, a public apology from the profession might be in order, and the preface to the printed text of The Triumph of Peace avows that its intention had been to celebrate ‘the happiness of our kingdom, so blest in the present government and … our native Princes’ (lines 3-5).15 One might assume that the lawyers had taken the opportunity of an address to the king to make some assertions about their point of view on the affair, were it not that the king and queen both expressed themselves ‘exceeding well pleased with that Testimony which they lately gave us, of their great respect and affection to us’,16 and commanded that the whole show be restaged all over again ten days later at Merchant Taylors' Hall in the city.

Understandably, Orgel and Strong treat The Triumph of Peace as an appropriation of the masque form by the court's critics; it is an attempt to speak to the king in his own language. But if that is the case, the masque would appear to have failed; the king took its criticisms for compliments, so that Orgel and Strong are driven to conclude ‘how exceedingly clumsy as a mode of political statement the form was’ (I, 64). Thus we have here a plain instance of the critical contradiction which I described earlier: the finest Caroline masque is praised as a cultural achievement but written off as politically inept. However, that is plainly not the way that it appeared to contemporaries. My argument will be that the masque's political meanings have been inadequately grasped because its conditions of production have been incorrectly delineated.

Orgel and Strong's underlying assumption is that Charles's government was illegal, but in this period ‘unparliamentary’ and ‘illegal’ are not synonymous. Before the Triennial Act (1641), there was no statutory machinery by which a monarch could be compelled to rule with parliament. Parliament had great symbolic force as an icon of one kind of consensual government and the assumption that kings ought to call frequent parliaments was profoundly rooted, yet, as Charles reminded the 1626 parliament,

parliaments are altogether in my power for their calling, sitting and dissolution; therefore as I find the fruits of them good or evil, they are to continue, or not to be.17

In early Stuart England parliaments were occasional events, called by kings to advise, grant finance and legislate. Charles (and his father before him) had little desire to legislate, and if he could raise finance by other means then he had no need for parliament. The political élites may have preferred more parliamentary contact, but there was nothing ‘illegal’ about this. Rather, in an age before the separation of powers between the executive and the judiciary, Charles's judges were also administrators, and his administrators were often judges.18 The criteria by which parliament would or would not be called were not legal but financial and political.

Thus criticism of the illegality of Charles's rule does not mean resistance to non-parliamentary government (though in the absence of confidence in the king the argument might finally be stretched that far). What was at stake here were the strategies by which non-parliamentary government was being operated—not whether Charles was to rule but whether he was ruling with proper respect for the constraints of law—and here there were plenty of areas for disagreement. In the parliaments of the 1620s both James and Charles had faced critics who used legal arguments to challenge some of the unpopular sources of income on which the crown relied—such as patents and monopolies (attacked in 1621 and 1624), forced loans (1626) and tunnage and poundage (normally granted to the king as a matter of course but, for complex reasons, never fully authorized by Charles's early parliaments)19—but with the premature dissolution of the 1629 parliament these issues were left unresolved. Despairing of ever being able to achieve a working relationship with his turbulent assemblies, in the 1630s Charles began systematically to exploit dues and privileges which the crown held as of right. It is this development of ‘projects and extraordinary courses’ that forms the background to The Triumph of Peace.

Three areas are especially relevant. Firstly, I have already mentioned the attempt to tighten-up discipline and authority which was enforced across the country. The gentry were sent back to their localities; regulations were issued for governing protocol at court; a series of proclamations on vagrancy, poor relief, overcrowding in London, the export of grain, plague, the observance of Lent and so forth announced Charles's intention of implementing the full force of the statutes; a Book of Orders was sent to the magistracy in 1631 which complained of past laxity and demanded that they oversee the poor, idle and young, keep up public works, maintain employment and regulate alehouses and petty crime. The Privy Council threatened to enquire into the behaviour of local officers, monthly reports were demanded, the judges on circuit exhorted parish officials to be diligent. Charles was looking to implement an energetic reformation founded on the efficient running of the machinery of government: his personal influence was intended to be distilled to every level of the nation's life.20

Secondly, Charles set himself to realizing to the full any privileges which might have financial value to the crown. In particular, ancient rights which had long lain dormant or were virtually defunct were revived and rigorously implemented. For example, the obligation on all freeholders of £40 and above to proceed to the honour of knighthood was implemented, and a commission established for compounding with those who had failed to take up their knighthood at the coronation. By 1635 this had produced £165,000. Another commission was organized to compound with royal tenants whose titles to their land were defective or non-existent, and moved against people occupying reclaimed land, or who had enclosed or encroached upon commons and wastes. Related to this was the vigorous revival of the feudal forest laws and the antiquarian scrutiny of the boundaries of royal forests. The relentless prosecution of the crown's forest rights promised huge returns but was particularly open to abuse; a forest court sitting at Gloucester in 1634 for the first time since the reign of Edward I fined two landowners £80,000 for cutting timber and declared that seventeen towns had encroached on the royal forest, while on another occasion the boundaries of Rockingham Forest were increased from six to sixty miles. The Court of Wards, which administered royal rights over minors and their estates, was another profitable institution producing a vastly augmented return in the 1630s.21

Thirdly, Charles's rule in the 1630s was increasingly reliant for its implementation on the courts connected with the prerogative powers of the crown, and especially the court of Star Chamber, through which royal proclamations were enforced. Star Chamber became notorious for the political trials which were conducted there (including those against William Prynne), but its more regular work involved the punishing of breaches of proclamations, unlawful residence in London, unlawful building of tenements, infringing of monopolies, hoarding of corn, the laxity of sheriffs and so forth. Increasingly, such prosecutions were conducted with an eye to compounding and the crown's financial interest; much the same goes for the Councils of the North and of the Marches.22

It is important to recognize the technical legality of all this activity. Orgel and Strong completely misunderstand the situation when they write (apropos of Ship Money) that the basic question ‘was whether the King could make the law without consent of parliament’ and that ‘Noy had worked zealously to keep the issues out of the courts’ (I, 63,65). The issue was not the making but the interpreting of law, and in many respects Charles's rule was excessively legalistic. Charles repeatedly consulted with the judges and was eager at every stage to test the validity of his powers in the courts; the 1630s have been well described as ‘a decade of intense government by common lawyers’.23 The problem was that as the decade progressed so the parade of legal correctness was increasingly placed in service to Charles's pressing financial needs. The punishment of breaches of proclamations with a hefty Star Chamber fine is a case in point. In the Long Parliament John Pym was to complain that the desire for profitability had undermined the intention of the law and that the law was being enforced only to be sold: ‘Many great nuisances have been complained of, but when there hath been money given, and compositions made, then they are no more nuisances … the Star Chamber now is become a court of revenue’.24 Similarly, Charles's commission of enquiry into the excessive fees and perquisites taken by court officials was reduced to absurdity by the pardons that were granted on payment of composition; abuses were being ‘reformed’ in order that they could be translated into cash. Gradually Charles's legalism came to be seen as a threat to the security of the subject's liberties and property: as it was said of the Court of Wards, many ‘were exceedingly incensed … looking upon what the law had intended for their protection and preservation to be now applied to their destruction’.25

The ambiguity operating here was that the law was understood to uphold both the subject's liberties and the king's authority; Charles's father had been careful to establish that he was ‘King by the common law of the land’.26 From the point of view of the subject, however, as the crucial legal decisions all went in favour of the crown—most notoriously the Ship Money case—so the issue metamorphosed from a question of legality into one of politics. The alarm generated by these measures even among the more moderate of Charles's legally-minded gentry can be read in the account of Edward Hyde, former member of the Middle Temple, friend of poets and future leader of the Long Parliament's attack on the prerogative courts:

the damage and mischief cannot be expressed, that the Crown and State sustained by the deserved reproach and infamy that attended the judges, by being made use of in this and the like acts of power; there being no possibility to preserve the dignity, reverence, and estimation of the laws themselves but by the integrity and innocency of the judges.27

The gentry were among those on whom Charles's measures fell hardest, and not only because they were expected to dig deep; a major grudge against the Star Chamber was to be that it had allowed sentences of mutilation to be carried out against gentlemen. The effect of this can be read in Clarendon's language, as it struggles to represent in legal terms what was at root essentially a political anxiety—for example, he objects to distraint of knighthood that ‘though it had a foundation in right, yet, in the circumstances of proceeding, it was very grievous, and no less unjust’, but also that it displeased ‘all persons of quality, or indeed of any reasonable condition throughout the kingdom’.28 Charles may have had legal correctness on his side but the crisis of 1640, as W. J. Jones tellingly puts it, marked ‘that point when legal justification becomes politically unacceptable’.29 Furthermore, in the 1640s the judges themselves were to pay for their willingness to prop up what had finally become a discredited regime. John Selden was to comment sardonically: ‘The King's Oath is not security enough for our Property, for he swears to Govern according to Law; now the Judges they interpret the Law, and what Judges can be made to do we know’.30

III

This, however, is to anticipate, since the future bankruptcy of Caroline legalism could not be prophesied in 1634, though its underlying tendencies, and the policies which it was employed to support, could still be causes for concern. Of course anxiety about the king's policies does not in itself mean opposition to the king, though it may eventually come to that if the loss of confidence goes too far; what is remarkable about The Triumph of Peace is its open attempt to define common ground on a divisive issue.

We are fortunate to possess very full information about the preparation and audience of the masque, and here the co-operative nature of the enterprise is most in evidence.31 The committee of lawyers that devised the masque embraced every possible strand of opinion. On the one hand there was Sir John Finch, a courtier through and through, the speaker in the 1629 parliament who had refused to allow Denzil Holles and Sir John Eliot to read their declaration, and who, as Lord Keeper and Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, was a prime mover in the notorious Star Chamber and High Commission cases of the 1630s; he was impeached by the Long Parliament in 1640 and fled the country. Also courtiers, though more moderate and with former ‘opposition’ credentials, were William Noy and Sir Edward Herbert. Herbert had been one of the managers of Buckingham's impeachment and defence counsel for Selden in his prosecution after the 1629 dissolution; in 1633 he defended the bishop of Lincoln against Laud in the altar-table controversy. However, in 1635 he was appointed the Queen's attorney-general, and proceeded via the solicitor-generalship to Noy's old post; it was he who in 1641 would charge the Five Members with high treason, for which he was impeached by the Commons. On the other hand, in Edward Hyde and John Selden the committee also included constitutionally-minded critics of the king, the former becoming in 1640-41 one of the most determined opponents of Ship Money but after 1642 one of Charles's most determined supporters, the latter an MP who chose to remain in parliament until 1649 but who was distrustful of the legality of both parliament's actions and the king's. As for Hyde's friend Bulstrode Whitelock, this Middle Templar was to be active in political life into the 1650s, ending up as a Privy Councillor on Cromwell's Council of State.

The same kind of bridging of gaps is notable in the performance of the masque. The event cost the lawyers an astonishing £5013, but often the services on which they were drawing were those of court musicians and costumers, while other service personnel that were involved were retainers from aristocratic households on loan to the lawyers.32 More important is the fact that the masque was not only performed privately for the court but preceeded by a procession through the city streets in Whitehall. The masque was expected to generate interest, for some 3000 copies of the text were printed in anticipation, but it was the procession ‘in the nature of a triumph’ that really created the widest attention and was said to have ‘attracted a great crowd, exciting the curiosity and applause of all the people’.33 Normally masques were exclusive affairs and watched by only a narrow social and political élite, but the lawyers saw to it that their statement was addressed to a wider public: The Triumph of Peace is that unique object, a Caroline masque that reached both a courtly and a plebeian audience.34 Nor was the audience at Whitehall devoid of its potential tensions, since we know that the masque attracted spectators whom we would not normally associate with royal festivities. The visitors from the Inns of Court included the King's Bench Justices Jones and Berkeley, who in 1638 were to give judgment in favour of Ship Money, but also George Croke, whose outspoken and uncompromising judgment against the same levy was to turn him into a puritan hero, and a coach was even hired for Simonds D'Ewes, the godly lawyer who would visit Prynne in prison, sit among the Presbyterian party in the Long Parliament and write in his autobiography a thunderous seven-page assault on the pernicious sin of Ship Money.35 Amusingly, D'Ewes's puritan principles led him in retrospect to suppress from his autobiography any mention of his attendance at so frivolous an event as a masque. It may be worth mentioning also that the author, James Shirley, though he ridiculed Prynne in the preface to his play The Bird in a Cage (published 1633), was not in his other writings exactly an uncritical admirer of kings.36

In choosing to make their masque a triumph, the lawyers were borrowing the typical iconography of Whitehall: Charles had himself paraded as a Roman emperor in Albion's Triumph, two years before. But it is possible that they were also following the lead here of Thomas May's historical poem The Reign of King Henry II (1633) which included an extended passage contrasting the happy amity of Henry and his sons with the sight of a victorious military triumph:

This sight more joy'd the hearts of people now,
Then any triumph of a warre could doe.
Nor could the greatest conquest, by the blood
Of slaughter'd nations purchas'd, be so good.
So did th'Italian youths follow in throngs
Their laurell'd chariots with triumphant songs,
When captive Kings were brought, when woefull stories
Of ruin'd lands were made their envy'd glories.
Before this triumph no sad captives goe
To waile in chaines their woefull overthrow;
No pale dejected lookes, no hearts afraid
Are found, no envy'd glories are display'd;
But gentle peace does with a gracious eye
Appeare, and leade the faire solemnity.
Whose crowne of olive does more glorious show
Then any victor's laurell wreath could doe.

(sig. K6r)

May had himself a past connection with the Inns of Court, and his poem, dedicated to Charles, was full of improving political reflections. What may have caught the lawyers' attention in this section was its theme of reconciliation. Henry's sons raise a rebellion against him, but eventually an accord is struck up again; they return to their duty and he attends to their grievances and, ‘like a wise and noble Potentate, / To cure the sad diseases of his state … beginnes’ (sig. K6v). Among the reforms involved in this appeasement is a substantial section praising Henry for instituting circuit judges and improving the law:

Those mighty kings who by such specious deedes
As founding towers or stately Pyramids
Would raise their names, and by that vast expence
Doe seeke the fame of high magnificence,
Doe not deserve, by those proud workes they raise,
So true an honour, nor such lasting praise,
As he, whose wisedome to good manners drawes
The mindes of men by founding wholesome lawes
And planting perfect justice in a state.

(sig. K7r)

Better, it seems, to be a legal than a princely king. In other respects the sentiments of the masque bring to mind the kinds of language and attitudes associated less with the court that with city pageants.

In its opening lines, Shirley's masque bridges one of the gaps of the 1630s. The text begins with Confidence and his friends Fancy, Jollity and Laughter welcoming to court Opinion and his family Novelty and Admiration. Confidence is a courtier, a ‘gay man’ (208) with slashed doublet, long hair and ribbons (35-39), while Opinion, it appears, is a country gentleman, wearing an ‘old-fashioned doublet of black velvet and trunk hose’ (33), carrying a ‘grave’ face (171) and inclined to ‘like nothing’ (280). Thus the show begins with the country coming up to court. The antimasques which these characters present are fanciful, but they refer in a general way to the social welfare programme which Charles had been seeking to implement. There is first a tavern, with its gamesters, wenches and beggars, and it is, beside, an irregular one, of the kind that Charles had recently been commanding his officers to bring within the control of a comprehensive licensing system:37

NOVELTY.
A spick and span new tavern.
ADMIRATION.
Wonderful, here was none within two minutes.
LAUGHTER.
No such wonder, lady, taverns are quickly up.
It is but hanging out a bush at a nobleman's door, or
an alderman's gate, and 'tis made instantly.

(301-05)

Similarly, the beggars are members of the idle poor, who fake disabilities to earn charity, then throw away their crutches and dance at their success:

OPINION.
I am glad they are off. Are these the effects of peace?
Corruption, rather.
FANCY.
                                                                                                    O, the beggars show
The benefit of peace.

(328-30)

The gallants at the tavern are cheated, a merchant is nearly robbed in a grove by sturdy rogues, Confidence and his friends all become drunk: the antimasques genially but pointedly present images of peace as it is without benefit of law. When Irene (Peace) arrives and banishes the grotesque characters of the antimasques she calls for Eunomia (Law) to support her: ‘Appear, appear, Eunomia … / Irene calls. / Like dew that falls / Into a stream, / I'm lost with them / That know not how to order me’ (505-11). These antimasques would seem to be complimentary to Charles's reforming purposes, though the reforms they isolate for praise are the ones most likely to be welcomed by the conservatively-minded country gentry.

The fifth antimasque, which satirizes, in the persons of six eccentric inventors, the granting of crazy monopolies, is known to have been the brainchild of Attorney General Noy. This has created considerable confusion since Noy himself was responsible for licensing some of Charles's preferential economic projects, including the notorious patent for royal soap. Of course the granting of monopolies to favoured courtiers had been fiercely censured in the 1620s parliaments and was to come under attack again in 1640, but the position was not quite the one of blatant illegality which Orgel and Strong take it to have been. Rather, in the interests of industry and innovation, the 1624 statute had discriminated between different kinds of monopoly and excluded from condemnation monopolies held by corporations and, for limited periods, inventions. The characters in the antimasque are quite clearly described as ‘Projectors’ (339) who are seeking either to patent ludicrously unworkable inventions or to impose their whimsies upon the long-suffering public at large, like the jockey who, said Whitelocke, ‘signified a Projector, who begged a Patent, that none in the Kingdom might ride their Horses, but with such Bits as they should buy of him’.38 Obviously Noy's function at court was to get the best return for his royal master, but he had himself been a parliamentary critic of monopolies and at court in the 1630s he seems to have been attached to the opposition to Lord Treasurer Weston who was inclined to allow mere racketeering.39 His antimasque admonishes the king concerning his observation of the Statute of Monopolies, and warns against the countenancing of any far-fetched scheme for the sake of the revenue it promised, as indeed was already beginning to happen. Though Noy was not immune from his own satire here, he must have believed that the antimasque expressed what he thought he was doing, while on the other hand his contribution was warmly praised by Whitelocke (see p. 122 above) and would have pleased such a man as Edward Hyde who was openly disgusted with the ‘projects of all kinds, many ridiculous, many scandalous, all very grievous … the envy and reproach of which came to the King, the profit to other men’.40

The main masque follows, the subject of which is the delicate relationship between Peace, Justice and Law, and the fable which the lawyers chose is one which carefully establishes the indispensability of law to government while remaining tactfully deferential and conciliatory towards the king. The antimasquers are dismissed by Peace as improper for the glorious presence of the King and Queen, but she is at pains to emphasize that what corrects the chaos of disordered peace is the controlling power of law. Descending alone, she laments her solitude, and complains that without Law she is ‘lost’ and distressed (510), and only when Law arrives to support her can the third deity, Justice (Dike or Astraea), descend. The relationship between Peace and Law is said to be equal, but Peace is markedly deferential to the blessings Law brings:

IRENE.
Thou dost beautify increase,
And chain security with peace.
EUNOMIA.
Irene fair, and first divine,
All my blessings spring from thine.
IRENE.
I am but wild without thee, thou abhorrest
What is rude, or apt to wound,
Canst throw proud trees to the ground,
And make a temple of a forest.

(529-36)

This fable is complimentary to the happiness of Caroline government but it carries its own particular emphasis: without Law, Peace will be wild or rude, and Justice will not descend to the earth. Peace is the spring, but Law is the sun that alone can ripen it (541-42).

The language of Charles's personal government is borrowed for the duet between Peace and Law:

EUNOMIA.
No more, no more, but join
Thy voice and lute with mine.
BOTH.
The world shall give prerogative to neither.
We cannot flourish but together.

(537-40)

It is important to realize that this does not constitute, as Orgel and Strong claim, ‘an argument against prerogative rule’ (I, 66). Irene is not Charles's government, but Peace, an aspect of that government, while it is equally misleading to construe Eunomia, Law, as equivalent to parliament. But while it is not a parliamentary way of government which is being advocated here, the duet still announces a clear warning about the way that non-parliamentary government is conducted: Law has to be strict and even-handed:

Irene enters like a perfum'd spring,
Eunomia ripens everything
And in the golden harvest leaves
To every sickle his own sheaves.

(541-44)

The harvest is golden because it respects the boundaries between mine and thine; this concluding couplet seems designed to voice discreetly but firmly the concern of Charles's propertied subjects that the law should not be manipulated to erode what they took to be their basic liberties. It is inconceivable that the law should operate in any other way than in the service of Charles's peace, but it must also regulate that peace to preserve the subject's rights and freedom: leaving to every sickle his own sheaves expresses precisely the political moral which the gentry and lawyers anxious about Ship Money and the forest laws were most concerned to emphasize. No disloyalty to the King is implied, but a statement about the nature and responsibilities of kingly government certainly is.

Orgel and Strong rightly praise the charged effect of the following action, in which Justice descends and addresses the King and Queen as Jove and Themis, ‘the parents of us three’ (581). It is difficult now to recover the impact of such a moment. Normally at Whitehall the king and queen danced in their own masques and were spoken of as if they possessed the attributes of the gods whose roles they played, but in The Triumph of Peace this element of impersonation was suspended since the lawyers who were shortly to appear really were the ‘sons’ of Peace, Law and Justice in whose roles they masqueraded. The lawyers' fiction enables them to make a gracious gesture of filial duty to ‘Jove and Themis’, but also to remind the king of the nature and identity of his ‘grandchildren’. Moreover, in addressing them as Jove and Themis, Divine Power and Divine Law respectively, Justice was pressing home exactly that distinction which Edward Hyde would later blame Charles for having overlooked:

In the wisdom of former times, when the prerogative went highest … never any court of law, very seldom any judge, or lawyer of reputation, was called upon to assist in an act of power; the Crown well knowing the moment of keeping those the objects of reverence and veneration with the people, and that though it might sometimes make sallies upon them by the prerogative, yet the law would keep the people from any invasion of it, and that the King could never suffer whilst the law and the judges were looked upon by the subject as the asyla for their liberties and security.41

In casting Charles and Henrietta Maria as power and law, Shirley is analysing royal authority even as he compliments it. The authority with which Charles rules is conceded, but so too is the separateness of the two principles which constitute his authority; the law not merely confirms the king's acts, it should be the guiding light by which power operates. Power must love law in emulation of the ‘chaste embraces’ (595) of Charles and Henrietta Maria.

The odd feature of the main masque entry which follows is the querulous tone in which the Genius identifies the masquers as the sons of Peace, Law and Justice:

No foreign persons I make known
But here present you with your own,
The children of your reign and blood;
Of age, when they are understood,
Not seen by faction or owl's sight,
Whose trouble is the clearest light;
But treasures to their eye, and ear,
That love good for itself, not fear.
O smile on what yourselves have made …

(630-38)

The Genius introduces the lawyers as if he were doubtful whether Jove would choose to recognize his relationship to them. His grandchildren wither without him, they are not ‘of age’ until they are ‘understood’, but it is only ‘faction or owl's sight’, that will interpret their behaviour maliciously. Indeed, Jove cannot but acknowledge the masquers, they are ‘children of your reign and blood’ and he must ‘smile on what yourselves have made’, and as if to prove the point the Genius attributes the sudden moving of the motionless masquers to the influence of his approving regard of them. Thus the speech represents as compliment and eulogy what must have seemed to the lawyers very like the enforcing of a political point, that it is not in Charles's interests, not in his nature even, to deny his affiliation to what they represent. The point is neatly made in the reveals that follow, as court and lawyers join together in dance.

So the masque sets out to build a bridge between the king, his advisers, and those with reservations about the tendency of his government; the deference of the lawyers' act of duty to their monarch is performed in such a way as to impose on to him a recognition of the complex and necessary interdependence of royal justice and law. Furthermore, in a striking and imaginative invention, Shirley builds this acknowledgement of consensus into the very fabric of the masque. Antimasques normally belonged to the early parts of the event, but in the middle of the main masque here ‘there is heard a great noise and confusion of voices within’ and ‘a crack is heard in the works, as if there were some danger by some piece of the machines falling’ (669-72). Into the main masque there tumble a carpenter, a painter, one of the black guard, a tailor and his wife, and the wives of an embroiderer, a feather-maker and a property man, each demanding to be allowed to see the dances, then, noticing the laughter and surprise of the people around them, they ‘pretend’ to be just another antimasque and go off in a dance. This moment must have been amusing and entertaining in performance, but its symbolic force is patent. These are all characters who have been involved in creating the masque yet excluded from its performance. Now they come to ‘challenge a privilege’ (694) and claim recognition for their contribution to the collective enterprise that a masque was: ‘What though we be no ladies, we are Christians in these clothes, and the King's subjects, God bless us’ (700-01). At the very centre of the masque was a deliberate violation of the illusion which presses the spectators to acknowledge that the apparently effortless magical effects were in fact achieved through an unseen but all-important act of collaboration. It is not exactly an affront to prerogative government, but a clear reminder, if any were needed, of the joint enterprise that alone made Charles's rule possible.

IV

About the reception of The Triumph of Peace we are, again, quite well-informed. Most directly, there is Whitelocke's long narrative of the performance which stresses both the inclusion of the satire against projectors and the king's gracious acquiescence in the whole enterprise: ‘I cannot but give them thanks for it, and shall be ready upon all occasions, to manifest the good opinion I have of them, and to do them and you in particular any favour’.42 Another suggestive pointer to the way that the masque was understood is the fact that when the king asked to see it a second time it was the city that offered to foot the bill. But before describing the direct contemporary comments that have come down to us, I should like to consider first two other texts which constitute themselves as indirect responses to The Triumph of Peace. Charles's public reply was to invite 120 lawyers to court five days later to see him dance Thomas Carew's masque Coelum Britannicum.43 This had been in preparation at least since the beginning of the year, but essentially it addresses itself to the same theme as The Triumph of Peace, the Caroline renovatio of church and state. The masque opens with the arrival of Mercury at Whitehall to announce the forthcoming reformation which is to be led by the example of the newly-disciplined English court, which even Jove himself emulates:

                                                                                          Your exemplar life
Hath not alone transfus'd a zealous heat
Of imitation through your vertuous Court,
By whose bright blaze your Pallace is become
The envy'd patterns of this underworld,
But the aspiring flame hath kindled heaven;
Th'immortall bosomes burne with emulous fires,
Jove rivalls your great vertues, Royall Sir,
And Iuno, Madam, your attractive graces;
He his wild lusts, her raging jealousies
She layes aside, and through th'Olympique hall,
As yours doth here, their great Example spreads.

(62-73)

Mercury stands before the ruins of a great Roman city, typifying the disorder which is to be returned to civility under King Charles; the various measures mentioned in the masque—proclamations for regulating taverns and the sale of tobacco, rectifying the ‘sophistication of wares’ (236), controlling commodities, commanding the gentry back to the country—correspond to proclamations which Charles himself had intensively put into practice around 1633-34.44 So successful is this reformation of earthly discipline, says Mercury, that Jove has been moved to reform his heavens; the bad constellations will be removed and Charles and his heroic courtiers stellified in their place.

The interesting feature of this masque is Carew's inclusion, beside Mercury, of the scurrilous railing god Momus, who restates Mercury's idealized account of Caroline government in considerably less idealized terms. It has sometimes been supposed, most recently by Annabel Patterson,45 that Momus's voice admits a radical ambiguity, a current of scepticism or parody which disallows the royal reformation even as it advances it. This, I hazard, is an overstatement which makes nonsense of Charles's sponsorship of the masque; rather, Momus might be better described as affectionately guying the inflated fable in which the whole elaborate enterprise is wrapped but which will (notwithstanding) be brought to a spectacular culmination later in the evening.

Momus is noteworthy for the legal language in which he specializes: the poets, he says, have a ‘Patent’ to draw down gods on masque nights (127), Jove presides over a ‘convocation of the Superlunary Peers’ (199), the constellations are dissolved ‘by the authority aforesaid enacted’ (213), incontinencies are punished in Jove's ‘high Commission Court’ (222), new orders are ‘read in the Presence Chamber, by the Vi-President of Pernassus’ (234-35), Jove is to redecorate his ‘Starre-Chamber’ (437), and so on. Momus's language is a direct reflection of his role as spokesman for the legal machinery by which the Caroline reformation is being enforced: his summary of Jove's declarations, he tells Mercury, is a quotation from ‘a passage at a Counsell-table’ (223-24), and when the constellations have been darkened he announces Jove's desire to replace them in a passage which pretends to be a royal proclamation:

                    O yes, O yes, O yes,
By the Father of the gods,
and the King of Men,

Whereas we having observed a very commendable practice taken into frequent use by Princes of these latter Ages …


… Given at Our Palace in Olympus the first day of the first month, in the first yeare of the Reformation.

(421-65)

This is a remarkable comic version of the public pronouncements that must have been all too familiar under the personal rule.

Potentially, then, Momus could well have projected the doubts of the lawyers in the audience about the legalism of Caroline government, and at first this truly seems to be his role for when announcing his name and function he says that he sits in heaven's ‘Parliamentary Assemblies’ and though he has ‘no vote in the sanction of new lawes, I have yet a Praerogative of wresting the old to any whatsoever interpretation, whether it be to the behoofe, or prejudice, of Iupiter his Crowne and Dignity, for, or against the Rights of either house of Patrician or Plebeian gods’ (146-52). This joke openly admits mention of the anxieties about the loss of traditional laws and liberties which lie behind The Triumph of Peace, but it seems clear that its thrust is basically reassuring: the fear is admitted in order to be acknowledged and so defused. And Momus's part is like this throughout the masque. The subject of his ironies is not the royal government but the fiction of the masque itself: it is Mercury whom he repeatedly twits, not the King. In effect, Momus concedes the point which was being urged in the late, unexpected antimasque in The Triumph of Peace, that the masque is not in itself a form of power but a symbolic elaboration of that power, that Mercury's fable projects not an image of what Charles's government is but what it aspires to be. Momus provides a bridge between the ‘British Hercules’ and his less dazzled observers, a safety-net against scepticism: in the final scene Carew can represent the Stuart dynasty as frankly transcendent having already admitted the less than transcendent measures by which this ideology is sustained.

Thus Coelum Britannicum responds to, and in some ways counters from the king's side the hesitations about confidence in Charles built into The Triumph of Peace. My second text, however, reworks Shirley's masque from a perspective of almost completely forfeited trust. This is The Tragedy of the Cruel War, an anonymous pamphlet of 1643, recently re-discovered and found to be a revamping of Shirley's antimasques and the first three songs in a context of real internecine violence.46 In this sad little squib, the antimasque characters have become symbolic of the woes that have overtaken the once peaceful land. Laughter, Fancy, Novelty and so on are all frivolous scoundrels who ‘revive the drooping consciences of the Cavaliers and make them merry in their greatest cruelties’ (53-55), the beggars and drunkards display the ‘effects of warre and corruption’ (136), the projectors have become either businessmen who are making money from the war or victims whom war has reduced to a deplorable condition. The last page reprints the songs of Irene and Eunomia with marginal notes that reinterpret them as a commentary on the relations of king and parliament: ‘The world shall give / Prerogative to neither, / We cannot flourish but together’ (211-13).

Whoever wrote this pamphlet, he was a neuter whose sympathies lay broadly on the parliamentary side: his pamphlet represents the Cavaliers as bloody, cruel and popish, but he still hopes that the king may be brought back to an accommodation with his parliament. His pamphlet is interesting for seizing as it does on the apparently contradictory resonances of Shirley's text. On the one hand the implied social criticism of the antimasques has become an open rebuke to the King's misdemeanours, on the other admonition to the King to take the path of conciliation has understandably become even more urgent. The distrust of Charles which is latent but always held in check in the masque can in 1643 be openly acknowledged.

All of which is enough to send us back to that aspect of the masque which I earlier mentioned in passing, that it is not one event but two, a private entertainment and a public triumph. Whatever the conciliatory noises of the performance at Whitehall, the parade of the lawyers through the city streets cannot have been devoid of tougher implications. Whitelocke was at pains to stress the magnificence of the show the lawyers mounted. The procession was led by twenty footmen; then followed a marshal and a hundred gentlemen on horseback, each with two lackeys and a page, heralded by trumpets and lit by a ‘multitude of torches’; then came the antimasquers, each with their own music, then two huge open chariots and six, with figures in the habits of gods, torches and musicians, then the four chariots carrying the ‘Grand Masquers’, designed after ‘the Roman Triumphant Chariots, as near as could be gathered by some old Prints’, with footmen at the side and ‘Torches and flaming huge Flamboys’ that ‘made it seem lightsom as at Noon-day’.47 Each of the hundred gentlemen wore suits that cost above £100, so that the cost of the procession alone was in excess of £10000. To the King this was most gratifying, and he made them walk twice around the tiltyard, but one wonders whether the ‘multitude of the Spectators in the streets’ understood the message to be rather different. The triumphal procession was the single most important spectacle to be staged publicly in London in a reign that, through royal insolvency, had not even seen a coronation entry. To the King it meant compliment, but it seems quite likely to me that the citizens may have read it as a statement of the wealth and importance of one section of the gentry, England's parliamentary class.

This is certainly what some courtiers took it to mean. It was expected in advance that the masque was intended in some way as a show to rival what the court could mount; one courtier wrote in October 1633, ‘The emulation that will be between the Inns of Court men and the courtiers you may easily imagine’.48 Another courtier, George Garrard, was far from reassured by the event:

Oh that they would once give over these Things, or lay them aside for a Time, and bend all their Endeavours to make the King Rich! For it gives me no Satisfaction, who am but a looker on, to see a rich Commonwealth, a rich People, and the Crown poor. God direct them to remedy this quickly.49

This comment is usually read as if it were a reflection on the escapism of masques, but Garrard is actually acknowledging The Triumph of Peace as a threat. It is not the occasion's extravagance that has upset him, but the political imbalance that it has revealed. He plainly has the lawyers' expertise and the masque's theme in mind when he supposes they could make the King rich if they would. For him the gesture simply has not been conciliatory enough, and much the same view was expressed retrospectively by a royalist historian in 1655 when he wrote ‘This entertainment was very costly to the City, so dear was then, I say not this King, but their own vanity to them, and that this vanity was dearer to them than their King is evident, because some few years after, when they flourished, and he wanted most to represse the Scottish-darings, he could not obtain from them any the least pittance of supply’.50 Another contemporary spelled out in the form of a poem on the procession implications which may have struck many minds:

These are the sons of Charles's peaceful reign
Whom yet if war's rude accents shall constrain
To put on arms will quickly understand
The laws of arms as well as of the land,
And be as valiant in the midst of fight
As they seemed glorious in the masque of night.(51)

This anonymous observer has patently read the event as a show of strength. The sons of peace may love Charles so much that they would go to war for him, but the only hopes for war that get expressed in the 1630s are for a patriotic and godly campaign against the Habsburg to recapture the Palatinate and further true religion. It would have been an event that necessitated the recall of parliament and the implementation of a militant foreign policy: this is not a suggestion that would have especially gladdened Charles's heart.

V

This essay has been investigating ways in which the court masque, a seemingly ‘decadent’ form, can be understood to be participating in, rather than retreating from, the political and ideological shifts obtaining at its specific historical moment. It should be clear, I hope, that the relationships in which this masque is sited with respect to its circumstances of production were considerably more problematic than they have usually been understood to be, and that far from being a political ‘irrelevance’ The Triumph of Peace is a strenuous attempt at a meaningful political gesture—it advances counsel, it offers grounds for conciliation, it seeks to define an accommodation. Of course the freedom of manoeuvre of the masque is restricted by the necessity of offering homage of a conventional kind to the king, but within these limits the masque's political content is not minimal. Its interest (and our sense of its superiority to the general run of masques of the 1630s) lies in Shirley's attempt to negotiate between attitudes which, if not yet contradictory, were ultimately going to be found to be incompatible.

Since the participants in the masque were people who would eventually find themselves on opposite sides of the political divide, the masque can be said to be particularly revealing of the unrealised tensions imminent in its moment of production. It is apparent that the ability of both Charles and his future opponents to suppose that the masque spoke for them rests on two things. Firstly, there were contradictions and unconformities present in the political and legal ideologies of the decade which, before the breakdown in 1642, had not been fully articulated or brought to consciousness: it is easy to see how Charles may have thought that he was ruling as the lawyers were asking him to do, especially since he and the lawyers are still employing an ideology of consensus which obscures their actual disagreement concerning the operation of that consensus. Shirley has identified problems which are central to his age, but he lacks a language which would allow him fully to confront them (indeed, these are problems which the age would never satisfactorily resolve); even as he speaks of co-operation he admits contrary attitudes into his masque which are representative of tendencies that will eventually explode this dominant ideology from within.

Secondly, there is an equally important false consciousness coded into the circumstances of the masque which can only be extracted by a more complex hermeneutics than it has hitherto received; it is apparent that the masque voices different meanings depending on where you stand to watch it. To a considerable extent this is a feature which arises from the fact that the king is spectator rather than originator of The Triumph of Peace, but all masques must have been so affected, if not as markedly as this one. In this case, there are at least three audiences receiving and appropriating The Triumph of Peace, and they are all hearing significantly different things.

Of course The Triumph of Peace is anomalous, as I have already said. It is a masque presented to the court and not by it. But insofar as it is attempting to build bridges across gaps which in a matter of only a few years are going to be quite unbridgeable, it is performing from the outside-in a function the regular masques tried to do from the inside-out, and, in the absence of other public bridges in the 1630s (such as parliament), this function has very considerable importance. The willingness of subjects to participate in the royal culture and the ability of the King to comprehend the conditions of their participation are an exact index of the power of survival of the royal government. It is only when Charles suddenly finds that his masque audience is no longer listening that his difficulties really begin.

Notes

  1. S. Orgel and R. Strong, Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court, 2 vols (London and Berkeley, California, 1973).

  2. R. Strong, Splendour at Court (London, 1973).

  3. G. Parry, The Golden Age Restor'd (Manchester, 1981).

  4. Cf. G.R. Elton, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1974), II, 164-82.

  5. See my Theatre and Crisis 1632-1642 (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 7-11.

  6. See his Van Dyck: Charles I on Horseback (London, 1972).

  7. Exceptions to this generalization are Raymond A. Anselment, ‘Thomas Carew and the “Harmlesse Pastimes” of Caroline peace’, Philological Quarterly, 62 (1983), 201-19; and David Norbrook, ‘The Reformation of the masque’ in The Court Masque, edited by David Lindley (Manchester, 1984).

  8. This paragraph is largely dependent on Kevin Sharpe, ‘The personal rule of Charles I’ in Before the English Civil War, edited by Howard Tomlinson (London, 1983), pp. 53-78. See also J. P. Kenyon, Stuart England (Harmondsworth, 1978); John Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces (London, 1976); and Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics 1621-1629 (Oxford, 1979).

  9. Sharpe, ‘The personal rule of Charles I’, p.63.

  10. For a critical view of the staying-power of Charles's personal government, see D. Hirst, Authority and Conflict: England 1603-1658 (London, 1986), pp. 160-87.

  11. See Elton, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, III, 3-57.

  12. See, for example, Derek Hirst, ‘Court, and country and politics before 1629’ in Faction and Parliament, edited by Kevin Sharpe (Oxford, 1978), pp. 105-38; Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces, pp. 14-17. On Noy, see especially W. J. Jones, ‘“The Great Gamaliel of the Law”: Mr. Attorney Noye’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 40 (1977), 197-226.

  13. See D. B. J. Randall, Jonson's Gipsies Unmasked (Durham, N.C., 1975).

  14. B. Whitelocke, Memorials of the English Affairs (London, 1682), p. 20.

  15. I quote The Triumph of Peace from the text edited by Clifford Leech for A Book of Masques in Honour of Allardyce Nicoll, edited by T. J. B. Spencer and S. W. Wells (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 275-313.

  16. Whitelocke, Memorials, p. 21.

  17. J. P. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution (Cambridge, 1966), p. 59.

  18. See W. J. Jones, Politics and the Bench (London, 1971), p. 16.

  19. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution, pp. 60-61.

  20. See especially L. M. Hill, ‘County government in Caroline England’ in The Origins of the English Civil War, edited by C. Russell (London, 1973), pp. 66-90; and also Sharpe, ‘The personal rule of Charles I’, pp. 58-63, and T. G. Barnes, Somerset 1625-40 (London, 1961), passim.

  21. See Jones, Politics and the Bench, pp. 95-103; Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution, pp. 86-89.

  22. Jones, Politics and the Bench, pp. 103-08; Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution, pp. 117-20.

  23. Jones, Politics and the Bench, p. 94.

  24. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution, pp. 201-02.

  25. E. Hyde, History of the Rebellion, edited by W. D. Macray (Oxford, 1888), I, 199.

  26. Jones, Politics and the Bench, p. 30.

  27. Hyde, History of the Rebellion, I, 88.

  28. Hyde, History of the Rebellion, I, 85.

  29. Jones, Politics and the Bench, p.vii.

  30. J. Selden, Table Talk, edited by R. Milward (London, 1689), p. 21.

  31. See Whitelocke, Memorials, pp. 18-21; Trois Masques à la Cour de Charles Ier d'Angleterre, edited by M. Lefkowitz (Paris, 1970); and T. Orbison, ‘The Middle Temple documents relating to James Shirley's Triumph of Peace’, Malone Society Collections, 12 (1983), 31-84.

  32. Orbison, ‘Middle Temple documents’, p. 41; Whitelocke, Memorials, p. 19.

  33. G. E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols (Oxford, 1941-68), V, 1156, 1157.

  34. In this respect the masque resembles other entertainments produced by the Inns of Court (such as Gesta Grayorum, 1594) in which the private revels were carried out into the city streets.

  35. Orbison, ‘Middle Temple documents’, pp. 60, 70; S. D'Ewes, The Autobiography and Correspondence, edited by J. O. Halliwell, 2 vols (London, 1845), II, 105, 129-36.

  36. See my Theatre and Crisis, pp. 163-79.

  37. The antimasques are discussed in detail by Lawrence Venuti in ‘The Politics of allusion: The gentry and Shirley's Triumph of Peace’, English Literary Renaissance, 16 (1986), 182-205, an interesting essay which appeared too late for me to be able to make use of it in writing this article. Venuti explores the masque's allusions to Charles's local government initiative in greater detail than I do here; however, I cannot accept his argument that the masque is to be read as an attack by the lawyers, in the crown's behalf, on the gentry whom Charles was at that time attempting to compel back to their country estates. The categories of ‘lawyer’ and ‘gentleman’, while not coterminous, cannot be distinguished so rigidly in this period: into which category would he put Hyde, Whitelocke or D'Ewes? Similarly, many of the details of his interpretation of the antimasques seem to me to be forced. For example, he assumes that Opinion, the country gentleman, is made to praise the absurd inventions of the projectors, but his language is actually marked by amazement and hostility. So too he describes the fantastic knight (antimasque 11) as a country gentleman who foolishly aspires to nobility, yet in this episode it is the ‘country gentleman’ who beats him and sends him off lame for his folly (458). And again, he describes the bowlers (antimasque 12) as an allusion to gentlemen who throw away their money in gambling at bowling greens in London, yet this is one of the antimasques performed against the scene of a woody landscape, not a town setting; these country sports can only with difficulty be stretched into an attack on the gentry in town.

  38. Whitelocke, Memorials, p. 20.

  39. Jones, ‘“The Great Gamaliel of the Law”’, passim; idem, Politics and the Bench, pp. 92-95.

  40. Hyde, History of the Rebellion, I, 85.

  41. Hyde, History of the Rebellion, I, 85.

  42. Whitelocke, Memorials, p. 21.

  43. Orbison, ‘The Middle Temple documents’, p. 34. I quote Coelum Britannicum from the edition of Rhodes Dunlap, The Poems of Thomas Carew (Oxford, 1949).

  44. See Dunlap, Poems of Carew, pp. 278-79.

  45. A. Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation (Madison, 1984), pp. 108-11.

  46. I quote the text from J. Fuzier, ‘English political dialogues 1641-1651: a suggestion for research, with a critical edition of The Tragedy of the Cruell Warre’, Cahiers Elisabéthains, 14 (1978), 49-68. See also G. Bas, ‘More about the anonymous Tragedy of the Cruell Warre and James Shirley's The Triumph of Peace’, Cahiers Elisabéthains, 17 (1980), 43-57.

  47. Whitelocke, Memorials, p. 20.

  48. Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report 12 (Cowper MSS), ii, p. 34.

  49. The Earl of Strafford's Letters and Dispatches, edited by W. Knowler, 2 vols (London, 1739), I, 177.

  50. H. L'Estrange, The Reign of King Charles, second edition (London, 1656), pp. 133-34.

  51. Quoted in M. B. Pickel, Charles I as Patron of Poetry and Drama (London, 1936), p. 147.

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