Privacy and the Private within European Court Culture

The explosive 2021 interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, pointed to several issues surrounding the modern monarchy and royal court in the United Kingdom. More importantly, the interview has brought to the fore a tension that has existed since premodern times — the conflict between the public and private embedded within the institution of monarchy and royal court culture. This conflict over the public and private lives of the British royal family and the court’s involvement has never been more viscerally fought over or caused such havoc than it has in modern times. During the interview, Markle proclaimed ‘There is the family and there’s the people that are running the institution’,¹ both of which she charged subjected her to mistreatment and racism.² This distinction between the family and the ‘institution’ is important because it not only characterises the political culture of the British royal establishment in the modern context, but it also identifies a clear power divide. The ‘institution’, or ‘firm’ as it is more commonly referred to by the royal family themselves, is particularly relevant for the collection of essays presented here, because the firm is very much the royal court, regardless of its label.³ According to the Sussexes, the royal court was the source of their problems — from their mistreatment by not providing support in dealing with the media and the violation of their privacy, to the firm’s attitudes towards race and racism — because of the firm’s priority for and devotion to the monarchy and its business endeavours.⁴ The prioritising of the royal establishment over the wellbeing of the Sussexes led to their decision to step back from royal duties in February 2020.

The modern court’s role is in many ways similar to its historical predecessors, in which the court is made up of the monarch and their family (primarily the senior members of the royal family, peers of the realm, civil servants, and household staff).⁵ Yet, the modern British royal court is markedly different due to its current constitution and organisation which is shaped by the media interchange. On the one hand, the firm depends on the media for public relations to support their charities and business activities, communicate their point of view and share royal news. On the other hand, the royal establishment are beholden to the public and have to deal with the demands of the media. In fact, following on from the 2021 interview, Harry and Meghan released a follow up Netflix documentary in December 2022. During the documentary, Harry explains in detail, complete with diagrams, that a ‘press pack of royal correspondents is essentially just an extended PR arm of the royal family.’⁶ Continuing, Harry then clarifies that ‘there’s been an agreement that’s been there for over thirty years’, which is reinforced when a commentator appears and further elucidates that ‘there’s a sort of unwritten contract between the institution and the press’. This ‘contract’ is based on the fact that ‘the taxpayer in the UK pays for the royal family’ and in return ‘there’s an expectation that the royal family is to be available to the media’, to ‘bring [the] private aspects of [royal] lives to light’.⁷

This incident is not an anecdotal example of the differences between courts, past and present. In fact, the opposite is true in that the present-day British monarchy and court functions and operates much like its historical counterpart. For example, early modern monarchs and their courts negotiated power through different methods of representation and popularity. Additionally, in the same episode of the documentary, Harry summarises how the separate communication offices are dedicated to senior members of the royal family. However, while they all work collectively to support the royal establishment, these communication offices operate from various royal palaces (i.e., Buckingham, Kensington, and St. James’s) and have different priorities and dissonant agendas which reflect the senior royals they serve.⁸ This division of communication offices has resulted in not only competing agendas, but also in creating friction by engaging in secret meetings and hidden activities. Consequently, these factions strain relations and have intensified the conflict. Thus, the similarities between courts of the past and their modern counterpart, and the public/private divide raises other comparative questions: in what ways did early modern courts inform or shape modern court practices?; how was historical privacy understood?; and what form of practices did the private take at early modern courts that are still evident today?

For the purpose of this special issue, there are two key points to take away from this modern example concerning the British monarchy. First, the distinction that Markle makes regarding the royal family and the ‘institution’, or ‘firm’, demonstrates the pervasive interplay between the monarchy and the royal court that has existed across time. Accordingly, the past and present interplay and conceptual understanding of monarchy and the royal court emphasises the continued importance of court culture and the relevance of court studies. Second, and more importantly, the case of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex exposes a key element of modern-day court culture and the inner-workings of the British monarchy – the protection of and reliance on privacy. In fact, much of these present-day issues regarding the boundaries between the public and private can also be seen in other twenty-first-century royal institutions in Europe. These include King Carl XVI Gustav of Sweden and the publication of his private activities, and the case of Princess Delphine, the illegitimate child of King Albert II of Belgium, who publicly proclaimed in a 1999 Christmas speech that his marriage crisis, the resulting affairs, and illegitimate daughter were part of his private life and he would no longer publicly comment on these subjects.⁹

While present-day monarchies and court cultures are inextricably connected to the modern conceptions of privacy as a human right, our historical understanding and examination of premodern (defined as pre-1800) notions of privacy at court has been, until now, underexplored. In December 2020, the Society for Court Studies and the Centre for Privacy Studies at the University of Copenhagen co-hosted an international, hybrid conference on ‘Privacy at Court: Reassessing the Public/Private Divide, 1500-1800’. For three days, the organisers, presenters, and participants explored the question: how did privacy exist within early modern courts? The aim of the conference was to distinguish the value and merits of researching privacy at court and consider how new research could be generated by investigating two points. The first point focuses on reassessing the extent that prevailing theories and approaches surrounding the public/private divide within court studies are still valid or need revision. The second point concentrates on exploring how privacy was identified, understood, and located within premodern European courts, and the impact of this new research within court studies.

The conference was a resounding success and has resulted in multiple publications, including a forthcoming edited collection with Amsterdam University Press and two journal special issues, of which this issue is one.¹⁰ At the end of the conference, several preliminary conclusions were identified. First, public and private aspects, or the front stage-back stage distinction developed by Erving Goffman and recently refined by Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger,¹¹ were not only performed at court, but overlapped in very intricate ways that emphasise the impact of human-social interactions at court. At court, the public and the private were negotiated by the rulers and their courtiers. More importantly, the public and private divide is no longer seen as being tied solely to the traditional dichotomy of the gendered, public and private spheres, but rather shaped by situations in which both males and females functioned as influential agents in and between both spheres. Second, discussions of the public and private emphasise dynastic relations and familial spaces, activities, and communication, which are key to understanding the significance of and interconnections between the household and court in early modern dynastic politics. Third, degrees of privacy varied according to geographic cultures and the different types of courts. Fourth, the boundaries between the public and private at courts were porous, overlapping, and ephemeral, often highlighting the scope of privacy and the various forms of privacy (i.e., withdrawal, secrecy, or intimacy). In fact, many conference participants called into question whether the public and private distinction has any value in current historical research, especially within court studies. However, despite the transcendence of the public, privacy and the private existed and played a crucial role in the mechanics and culture of household operations, and the regulation of personnel practices, spaces, and courtly behaviour in premodern Europe. One of the vital revelations, and central for this special issue, is how degrees of privacy were inextricably linked with sociability and politics within early modern court culture. This revelation transforms how we interpret the public aspects of sociability and politics within court culture and allows us to begin exposing the role that privacy played in the socio-political development of practices of access through the interactions/activities and spaces at court.

Court Studies through Privacy Studies

The ‘new court history’ of court studies challenges the notion that the premodern court was just an institutional structure, arguing that the court, by no means singular, functioned in a variety of ways.¹² As such, the corporality and emphasis of the public nature of the court suggests that degrees of privacy existed at courts and within court cultures. These degrees of privacy were not just instances that were remote to, devoid of, or removed from the public, but were moments that emerged in opposition to the public that was ‘official, professional, communal, or evident’.¹³ By thinking of historical privacy in this way, as just one example among many, we expand our research scope to consider privacy in various forms, including cases where privacy was signified through the unspoken, out of place, or absent impetuses of the court. With this approach, the emphasis is on the source materials to examine the language and descriptions of interactions, social engagements, and political exchanges. This process allows researchers to identify the semantics of privacy and the private, as well as their cognates to ‘better encapsulate the complex experience’ of early modern courts and court cultures.¹⁴ The examination of historical privacy within court studies is necessary and deserves further attention because it addresses the gaps surrounding the ‘politics of intimacy’ and advances the field.¹⁵ This neglect is perhaps due to the commonly held assumption that historical privacy: a) was non-existent before the distinction of a middle class; b) was elusive within premodern societies; or c) is considered anachronistic.¹⁶ However, recent research has demonstrated how to avoid anachronism by illustrating how early modern privacy was a context dependent phenomenon and must be examined within specific situations and settings.¹⁷

The concept and terms ‘privacy’ and ‘private’ are grounded in the twenty-first-century ideas associated with the right to privacy or ‘the right to be […] alone’.¹⁸ Yet, privacy as a concept and ideal cannot be reduced to this simple distinction because the private is often elusive due to the fact that it has different meanings for different people, and hinges on contrasting situations and disparate motivations. Furthermore, privacy itself is a modern ideal that has developed through historical circumstances, which carries with it specific nuances and significations.¹⁹ Thus, privacy as a definition cannot be anachronistically applied to analyse royal and imperial politics and the mechanics of power relations within early modern European societies.

To approach historical privacy, we must examine how it is understood and was used in the past, starting with the Latin derivative privatus and how it ‘has travelled through centuries in linguistically varied shapes’.²⁰ Thus, privacy and the private must be viewed as a ‘human phenomenon that is [bound up] with the experiences of withdrawal, boundary drawing, and control of access.’²¹ Consequently, this approach requires that we analyse instances of privacy through their cognates and terms that distinguish their meanings. More importantly, historical privacy must be seen as context-dependent: as relational and situational. Therefore, the phenomenon of privacy focuses on ‘artifacts, spatial markers, and vestiges of social practices’ as a means of tracing past indicators or signals of privacy in ‘human lives, actions, and experiences’.²² Additionally, historical privacy should avoid following the modern conception of privacy as being alone or without people around. In examining the different court and court cultures, historical privacy can be viewed as moments where only a few members of the court were present, occasions that were not visible or that did not take place with the full court in attendance.

As a result of approaching historical research, in this case court studies, through the examination of privacy within the specific contexts in which they emerge, there is no fixed concept of privacy, and it is not possible to broadly establish a definitive delineation of privacy in the past. Instead, we frame the use of privacy in each case through the indicators or descriptors of privacy cognates, terms and language found in the historical evidence. Privacy cognates include, but are not limited to: seclusion, withdrawal, privy, privity, secret, ‘solitude, intimacy’, hidden, exclusion, discrete, and so on.²³ For the purposes of this special issue, the contributors indirectly rely on the privacy cognates and contexts of privacy that demarcate boundaries within courts and court culture – private audiences, secret meetings and negotiations, private agents, and the collection and use of personal information. By employing the lens of privacy within court studies, we are able to enhance our knowledge and determine how the connections between courts, sociability, politics, and privacy shaped the ways in which politics, social order, and cultural practices relates to ‘individuals, social groups, economic structures, or the mentalities and perceptions of people in the past.’²⁴

Court Culture and Access

Court culture consisted of many layers from the institution of monarchy, political bodies, the hierarchical structures and ranks of the court, and the residencies of foreign ambassadors, to the language, activities, rituals, and customs of elite sociability.²⁵ Most of the scholarship, including recent assessments, on early modern court culture in Europe has stressed the public and visible nature of court culture.²⁶ Certainly, the nature and legitimacy of the royal and princely courts hinged on the effective exhibition of pageantry and splendour, showcasing majesty and the divine, the spectacle of chivalry and honour, and the clear display of status and power. Yet, the mechanics of court culture relied on the personal aspects of power, the attainment of status and patronage, and influence, which were all achieved through the degrees and forms of privacy, especially intimacy. Just as access, sociability, and politics within court culture stemmed from the public, these same elements transpired through the private.

Consequently, the analysis of privacy and the private within court culture is not directly dealt with and only casually alluded to in connection with access. In fact, Ronald Asch asserted that ‘The court was a public space, which gained its prestige and special function from the fact that it was also the ruler’s private space’.²⁷ While this is an important distinction, Asch does not elaborate on how the spaces were considered private or what happens when the public courtly spaces intersected with the ruler’s privacy. The key to distinguishing public spaces of court from the private areas for the ruler is through the analysis of access and accessibility. The historical understanding of access, particularly within court studies, ‘arose precisely in the interaction between the ruler and his subjects’, particularly courtiers.²⁸

Access was very much bound to personal monarchy and rooted in being closely connected or within physical proximity to the monarch. Accordingly, access was linked to notions of privacy because it served as a mechanism for regulating intimacy, withdrawal, and solitude. However, the key here is that access and privacy were intrinsically intertwined by one core element – the personal. Not only does the very definition of personal mean private, but the personal is also a ‘denote[d] condition’ and experience interfused with the ‘domestic, family-related, hidden-from-public view, [and] interior’.²⁹ As such, the court was the nexus or culture whereby personal relations, politics, social interactions, patronage, dynasty, and diplomacy, as well as art, architecture, music, science, literature and more, intersected. Access was a mechanism by which court culture operated to cultivate ‘influence and power.’³⁰

As the seminal expert on historical and courtly access, Dries Raeymaekers has emphasised the connections between access and the personal asserting that the study of access not only ‘functioned as an instrument of political and social distinction’, but was also ‘key in unraveling the early modern decision-making process.’³¹ However, other scholars, such as Jeroen Duindam and John Adamson have cautioned that access and political influence were not always synonymous, where ‘levels of access and seclusion differed from court to court’,³² while also stressing that ‘access and intimacy did not always equate [or result in] political power.’³³ Yet, what is clear is that in its fundamental role, courtly access was the regulation of the personal and private, which contributed to the ever-evolving and changing, situational nature of power relationships within court culture. By focusing on and analysing the connections between privacy and access, we expose not only the culture and sociability of courts and politics, but we also uncover how premodern inhabitants lived with one another, defined their experiences, and negotiated their relationships. The contributions of this special issue provide different perspectives of how access and privacy were demarcated and functioned through the everyday practices within court culture.

Politics and Sociability through Privacy at Court

Although the court was an extension of the royal and princely household, it was a complexly social and political environment, or ‘a permanent meeting place; one could go there for entertainment, company, conversation — simultaneously, seeking opportunit[ies].’³⁴ The court was more than an institutional structure and administrative unit. It was a living entity with its own culture comprised of various activities, points of contact, and socio-political characteristics that defined different European courts. More importantly, we need to analyse how the court socially engaged with the localities, communities, and civic authorities, and as identified in scholarship, how royal and princely households ‘shape[d] [the …] socialization’ and politics across court cultures in early modern Europe.³⁵

In many ways, the court constituted a political community that was active and included various individuals and groups — from the ruler, his or her families, courtiers and councillors, to the government assemblies, ambassadors, and subjects of the kingdom. At its core, the political community concentrated and engaged in activities, interactions, discussions, and communications that facilitated the negotiation of power, formed relationships and bonds, and enabled individuals to exercise influence. The court was the centre of political power and social capital, whereby the political power of intimates or favourites ‘rested on their ability to control access to the ruler, but it was this very monopoly which made [court favourites] so odious and often provoked such violent opposition against them’.³⁶ Time after time we have seen principal courtiers and members of the royal family become public villains within early modern societies, like the case of Thomas Cromwell’s rise and fall at the court of Henry VIII of England.³⁷

The core socio-political characteristics of European court culture were also rooted in social distinctions and rank, whereby sociability, communication, and interactions forged intimate relationships and solidified close bonds, tested loyalty and honour, negotiated status, and determined who had access at court. Sociability also involved the seen and unseen, the public and private, as well as personal connections and perceptions ‘that made up the social order’ and how individuals related to one another.³⁸ Simultaneously, privacy at court could also be staged or constructed, and even sensorially identified ‘not only through looking and not looking, seeing and not seeing, but [also] through hearing and not hearing’.³⁹ These unseen and private interactions and connections that contributed to sociability at court often occurred through informal points of contact and personal activities, like exchanging thoughts with the ruler and other courtiers while the sovereign pursued his recreational activities, or conveying messages in unoccupied spaces while royal entertainments were taking place, or having an intimate conversation with one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting in an alcove of the palace or a private room at a royal residence in the country that were ‘specially built’ for this purpose.⁴⁰ Incidents involving private interactions and conversations are certainly evident when we examine the progresses, travels, or tours of rulers. The itinerant nature of the royal and princely household and court did not always adhere to firm plans. Often the ruler’s entourage relied on ad-hoc arrangements that were informal and created opportunities to engage in unheard conversations, unseen actions, and private meetings with the sovereign that occurred away from the view of the entire court. However, the key distinction that binds political privacy and sociability together is the ‘informal interactions’ that operated outside the rules and practices of the formal public sphere. Therefore, personal exchanges and informal meetings were not always visible, nor did they involve the formal institutions of government or imperial branches. In these informal moments, degrees of privacy enabled individuals to exercise agency and influence at court or within government.

Based on this understanding, we can conclude that sociability was personal and reciprocal in many ways, and often involved the private through the unseen interactions, exchanges, and conversations. As the centre of culture, European courts served as ‘the stage where power was negotiated, the source of drama and propaganda, and the intersection of politics and diplomacy’ in the premodern period.⁴¹ The heightened reliance on and culture of access, as well as the ‘politics of intimacy’ gave rise to a form of social politics,⁴² which Elaine Chalus has established as ‘the management of people and social situations for political ends.’⁴³ However, the examination of social politics has revealed two issues. First, the analysis of social politics within court culture and its connection to and use of historical privacy, particularly how social politics shaped courtly experiences during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is underexplored within court studies. Second, the role or consequences of privacy in the practices or development of politics and courtly sociability has received little attention. By pursuing this line of enquiry, we gain a better understanding of how privacy contributed to the formation, process, and impact of power, decision-making, and governance within European court cultures. Additionally, the pursuit of this research enables us to also attribute both meaning and character to degrees of privacy and sociability at the courts of Europe. More importantly, the interconnections of privacy, access, sociability, and politics underscores the activities, actions, and spaces surrounding the court that coloured the situational nuances and character of specific European courts. This aids in providing more coherent and authentic comparisons between courts.

In addressing the second issue of studying social politics, the connections between privacy and social politics becomes clearer when we examine the cases and characterises of political privacy. Political privacy has been an ambiguous concept within the study of history and, like historical privacy, also risks anachronism. For the most part, political privacy has been bound up with the modern conceptions and debates surrounding the right to privacy. Within the modern context, political privacy derives from economic and legal scholarship that focuses on two conditions: a) rights to privacy that have political value or political aspects;⁴⁴ and b) rights of privacy against, or protection from, the state or government institutions, or protecting certain forms of political engagement.⁴⁵ Furthermore, there are other variations of political privacy that are used in the modern context, such as ‘private politics’ or ‘politics of privacy’.⁴⁶ Therefore, it is easy to see how using broad concepts like political privacy can result in anachronistic research.

However, when we examine the premodern period and the variety of source materials, we can identify examples where the interplay between politics and degrees of privacy at court are evident. These instances include accounts of private meetings between monarchs and their subjects or diplomats (i.e., private audiences and privy council meetings); the gathering and exchange of information through spy and intelligence networks; petitions or requests for mediation contained in intimate letters exchanged between women of power; gift-giving and a patronage system that hinged on the personal recommendations of intimates; the economic and commercial transactions that occurred at court; and the various religious rituals and confessional practices that transpired in private. At times, these accounts were ‘“private transcripts”’ that revealed the ‘sentiments and [unseen] actions’ that occurred at court.⁴⁷ It is these ‘private transcripts’ that exposed courtiers and servants who ‘secretly engaged in all sorts of subversive activities, stealing the [sovereign’s] property, embezzling public funds, letting strangers in the innermost parts of the palace, and so on.’⁴⁸ Yet in each of these instances, political privacy is a specific area of, and should use the approach of historical privacy, in which political privacy is not a fixed concept or historical idea, but rather it is a situational and fluid phenomenon. This porous phenomenon emerges in specific contexts connected to politics, policies, and diplomacy.

These moments of political privacy occur when the normal and formal political processes were exchanged through informal tactics, personal spaces, or ephemeral activities, which impacted and shaped politics, social orders, and cultures across Europe. As such, the normal process and practices of politics were not followed, and personal sentiments, ambitions, or objectives became a causal factor in the decision-making process or in the course of events, precipitating public consequences. For example, although it has been extensively examined, Queen Christina of Sweden’s conversion to Catholicism is nevertheless shrouded in secrecy and notions of privacy. In Autumn 1651, Christina had private meetings with two Jesuit clergymen from Italy, ‘disguised’ and introduced at court as Italian noblemen. These meetings consisted of ‘long and wide-ranging discussions on all facets of religion and other topics’.⁴⁹ While it was the norm for sovereigns to invite scholars and notable clergymen to court and exchange views and share knowledge, the need to conceal the identity of the Italian clerics suggest that Christina’s meetings with them would not have been well received publicly. What makes this episode with Christina even more unique is that one of the clergymen, Paolo Cassati, returned to Italy in May 1652 and announced that the Swedish queen would become Catholic. The consequences of the private meeting and Christina’s decision were felt almost immediately. By February 1654, the Queen proclaimed that she would convert and abdicate.⁵⁰

With this example in mind, the use of the privacy perspective poses two questions. First, given what we know that monarchs were never truly alone, how did Queen Christina have multiple private meetings with these clergymen without anyone knowing or raising suspicions? Second, what were the political and social consequences of Christina’s private activities? In analysing specific source materials with these questions in mind, we might be able to determine how degrees of privacy contributed to Sweden’s emerging court culture and rise as an early modern European power. As such, based on the determinants discussed previously, it is possible to deploy the idea of political privacy using a dual approach. First, utilising the methodology of privacy studies – any analysis or discussion of political privacy must be rooted in the historical evidence and their contexts. Second, to distinguish and define the use of political privacy by employing a recently developed model.

Lenses of political privacy model. Created and produced by Dustin M. Neighbors

Given the abstract and ephemeral nature of political privacy, the preliminary theoretical development of political privacy is broadly characterised as: the informal, unseen, unheard actions and interactions of monarchs, courtiers, diplomats, and familial intermediaries that exerted influence (in the broadest sense of the word) — to inform policies, encourage conformity, shape identity and perceptions, transform political authority, or change the balance of power. With this in mind, the recent development of political privacy as an analytical perspective within historical research, the ‘lenses of political privacy’ model distinguishes key aspects that expose instances where privacy and politics intersected.⁵¹ This model aids in determining the degrees of political privacy that emerged within the specific topics and contexts to which the lenses are applied. These lenses reflect three specific types of historical political privacy — institutionalised privacy, politicised privacy, and private politics.

The first lens, institutionalised privacy, concerns privacy that was inherent within the various political systems of early modern Europe. These private elements can be found interlinking the monarch, court, and government, particularly the privy council, the anointing at coronations, and ‘arcana imperii’. It is important to note that institutionalised political privacy was based on ‘a growing emphasis on the “craft” of rule’ and reflected a ‘tension between the idea that the greatest and weightiest questions should be discussed in public spaces like parliament, and the notion that they [the questions] were the ones which required greatest secrecy.’⁵² At the heart of this emphasis and tension was the Tacitean conception of ‘arcana imperii’ – the secrets, or mysteries, of state.⁵³ The politics and social order of the early modern period was shifting and evolving to accommodate a number of factors. The court was very much at the centre of this shift. As such, questions of royal prerogatives and common law, problems of counsel, and the role of state secrets were evident in the writings of the period.⁵⁴ These questions and problems, of course, were rooted in conflicts regarding the privy council’s legitimacy and the extent of their authority, protection of the monarch and state secrets, and the practices of politics and policy development. However, each of these elements was entrenched in the structures and process of personal rule, court culture, and government. Thus, political privacy was embedded in the institution of politics, power, and rulership – the foundations of state formation. Accordingly, it is possible that political privacy includes the ‘politics of intimacy’ or the privy chamber given that components of the ruler’s court existed to ‘protect the monarch’s secrets’ and the arcane nature of monarchy and majesty.⁵⁵ However, the increased distance between the privy chamber and privy council in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries highlights how the politics of counsel eventually led to its separation from the arcana imperii.⁵⁶

While privacy was in some ways institutionalised, politicised privacy relates to the privacy or private matters of individuals. This involves episodes where the personal aspects of an individual, religious beliefs/worship, disputes or intimate relations becomes a politicised matter. We can see this in the case of Charles I of England and his wife, Henrietta Maria when ‘power relations between [them] permanently broke free of both domestic privacy and arcana imperii by the mid-1640s.’⁵⁷ The key here is that politicised privacy is evident in ‘moments of transition from the “private” to “public”, from secret to disclosed, from circulated to purchased, which were marked by contemporaries.’⁵⁸ It might be helpful to consider scandals as part of this lens, given that the very nature of scandal was bound up with political power and sociability. Thus, courtly scandal disrupted the social order and opposed conformity to authority.⁵⁹ More importantly, scandal was rooted in privacy because the process of scandal was to take what was private (i.e., intimate relations, secret meetings, or hidden acts) and made them public. Let’s look at the 1615 Overbury scandal at the court of King James VI of Scotland/I of England. The scandal centres on the death of Thomas Overbury, who was poisoned while a prisoner in the Tower of London in 1613.⁶⁰ Two years after the murder, the King’s favourite and once close friend of Overbury, Robert Carr, the Earl of Somerset, and his wife, Frances Howard, the Countess of Essex were implicated in the murder and arrested. The connection of the Overbury scandal and politicised privacy is based on the fact that Overbury’s earlier downfall, subsequent murder, and arrest of Robert Carr all stemmed from private meetings, secret activities, and personal interactions of Carr, his wife, and the factions at the Jacobean court.⁶¹

The factional fighting intensified over the summer of 1615. It was through this factional conflict that the details of Overbury’s murder came to light, reaching a climax between September and October 1615, when Carr and his wife were implicated in Overbury’s murder. This period of time was a defining moment in which the Overbury murder became a scandal and a case of politicised privacy. Prior to 1615, the murder and its suspects were still not widely known. However, when King James launched the criminal investigation in September 1615, he ‘started a process that would push the Overbury affair into the public sphere. In doing so, [James] had transformed its political significance.’⁶²

The final lens, private politics, concerns private or unseen interactions, exchanges, or meetings that have political consequences. This includes instances where individuals exercise influence that alters or affects political outcomes or interactions that take place at royal or princely courts or within the environs of the auxiliary courts linked to specific members of the monarch’s family. For the sake of clarity, private politics concerns interactions and exchanges that do not occur through the formal or traditional processes, including those connected to arcana imperii, privy council, or parliament. For example, the intimate interactions that happened at the homes of leading courtiers, secluded exchanges during the ruler’s travels, or private meetings taking place outside the traditional spaces of court did or had the potential to have political consequences. Thus, it might be helpful to consider private politics to include instances of personal politics. By examining courts and court cultures, as well as premodern politics and society through the lenses of political privacy, we are able to further our understanding of the habits and practices, attitudes, behaviours, and experiences that shaped the politics and sociability of early modern courts. Additionally, these lenses are a tool to help not only identify political privacy, but to also demarcate the boundaries of court and household, community and state, domesticity and politics.

Privacy, Courtly Spaces and Environments

As a complex entity that was more than just the ruler’s household or the ‘frontier between the public and private lives of the monarch’,⁶³ the court consisted of ‘a far larger matrix of relations’ and spaces.⁶⁴ The spaces and environments where the matrix of relations played out was not exclusive to the primary buildings in the capital cities, but consisted of a ‘wider range of [social and] political sites than usually assumed: […] town halls, and meetings points of representative assemblies, but open fields as well as the back rooms of provincial public houses.’⁶⁵ It has been argued that wherever the monarch was the spaces or environments they occupied became royal spaces and thus became an ephemeral extension of royal magnificence and the royal court.⁶⁶ This can be seen when we examine the Tudor royal progresses or the royal travels of Henry III of France.⁶⁷ Following Duindam’s point of the court as a ‘temporary or permanent place’, we must, therefore, expand our conceptions of the court as stationary or existing only in formal, principal architectural structures, to include the court existing and operating through mobility or within ephemeral natural environments, like gardens and hunting parks. However, these courtly spaces and environments were social sites where ‘political forces intersected’,⁶⁸ whereby the development of politics and political exchanges occurred ‘not just from the centre, but [also] from the margin.’⁶⁹ As such, the official and central spaces for the court operated as chief sites dictated by formal practices, while the non-official spaces operated as extensions of the court and were dictated by informal practices. This is an important distinction because it is within the informal sites and practices that we can often identify degrees of privacy. Alternatively, within the central and formal spaces we can also see how the court facilitated moments of privacy through being a place ‘where subjects were confronted by the mystery of majesty, the essentially secret or arcane nature of royal or imperial rule.’⁷⁰ The key here is to explore how the arcane nature of rulership and courtly spaces were tied to notions of privacy.

The very basis of courtly access centres on getting close to the ruler or gaining admission to the physical spaces around them. Access was a vital feature that ordered ‘political life be it in terms of proximity to rulers, the presence and absence of key agents, period manifestations of Empires, a [growing] preoccupation with borders and shifts in political constellations within local communities.’⁷¹ However, access was flexible, which suggests that access was always in flux and never guaranteed. This makes sense when we see that court cultures and practices changed with rulers, dynasties, and the shifting favourites at court. The fluctuating scale and ephemerality of public and private, formal and informal spaces, at court, distinguished a level of access that particular individuals had. Consequently, favourites were not the only ones that could gain access at court. Other courtiers could gain various levels of access based on their reputation and social capital, which were at the heart of court politics. A courtier’s social capital rose only when their honour and prestige was successful ‘if the actions performed by [courtiers] and their families took place in public under the “sovereign’s gaze” and that of other courtiers.’⁷² The emphasis that the performance of a courtier’s social capital was only successful in public, suggests that in order to get the chance to perform in public, the courtier needed to engage in informal or private practices to negotiate, manipulate, or influence to secure access to perform at court. By examining privacy and the private within courtly culture, we can expand our interpretation of the different types and mechanics of court cultures in Europe, and how people not only understood but also navigated the formal and informal, public and private spaces of the court.

Contents of the Special Issue

The articles presented in this special issue all deal (directly and indirectly) with privacy and the interplay of access, sociability, and politics, particularly through the physical and ephemeral spaces, cultural activities, and personal relations at premodern courts. With the household and personal rule at its heart, European courts were the nexus of power and authority, which ebbed and flowed through balancing the public with the private. As such, the public/private divide has often been used by scholars to analyse and explain the spatial differences between the royal household and court. The public/private distinction remains ambiguous in connection to the private aspects. Thus, privacy or the private has often been treated as a peripheral necessity and historians have never really scrutinised the distinctions of what was private or who had privacy.

The articles in this special issue began as presentations for the 2020 conference in Copenhagen. Each of the pieces shed light on the multifaceted nature of the court in Spain, Denmark, England and Poland-Lithuania between 1550 and 1800. Although they employ different perspectives and use interdisciplinary source materials, the contributions collectively highlight how we can expand our interpretations of the court and court culture through exploring the moments and places where privacy, politics, and sociability intersected.

In ‘The Regulation of Private Spaces: The Codification of the Royal Chamber of the Spanish Monarchy in the Seventeenth Century’, José Eloy Hortal Muñoz highlights the scale of physical proximity, closeness, and access across a collection of royal spaces through analysing the regulations and ordinances of the Spanish monarchy, its courts, and households in the seventeenth century. This research demonstrates the ways in which specific private spaces were regulated and the role this regulation had on the politicisation of the monarch’s personal spaces and relationships. As a result, Muñoz’s article underscores not only the significance of the Spanish court and members of the household as they engaged in both institutionalised privacy and private politics through private discussions and meetings, but also how political privacy was protected. This study also illustrates how political sociability at that Spanish court was forged and operated. Additionally, Muñoz contributes an important geographic perspective to discussions by connecting early modern courtly access and historical privacy with this Spanish case study, while also highlighting the personal politics between Philip IV of Spain and one of his principal courtiers, the Count-Duke of Olivares.

All too often when we focus on the court, we concentrate on the principal residences and urban centres where the monarch and governments were based and how these locations reinforced power and majesty and facilitated politics and public discourse. Yet this narrow focus does not consider how satellite residences and country houses were important spaces that constituted a ‘relation construct and, in turn, a factor with potential to shape subsequent forms of human exchange.’⁷³ To clarify, in looking beyond the primary sites and spaces of monarchical power and court politics, attention must be paid to satellite residences and environments to understand the spaces that played a role in cultivating human exchanges and shaping court culture.

Kristine Dyrmann certainly demonstrates this approach brilliantly in her article, ‘The Court in the Countryside: Privacy and Political Sociability in the Suburban Villas of Copenhagen’s Late Eighteenth-Century Court Elite’. As Dyrmann illustrates, the personal, or perhaps private, locations and architectural places became important informal and ephemeral courtly spaces for social politicking. Thus, Dyrmann helps us to see how expanding the boundaries and types of court spaces to include the homes of courtiers, informal places, and secluded environments, can reveal how political sociability and court culture relied on the social interactions and private encounters that occurred in various informal settings. As a result, this research identifies instances of political privacy that were crucial to the development of politics and policies, and the negotiation of power.

Just as courts relied on spaces and buildings to control access, to communicate, and to engage in social politics, they also used recreational activities and natural environments as extensions of this control, communication and engagement. Expanding on Dyrmann’s use of space and activities, Dustin M. Neighbors examines how personal relations, politics, and access were not only forged via the physical environs of principal palaces and household spaces, but they also developed through the activities and natural environments of hunting. In his article, ‘Elizabeth I, Huntress of England: Private Politics, Diplomacy, and Courtly Relations Cultivated through Hunting’, Neighbors illustrates how the culture of hunting was a sociable pursuit that required expert knowledge and skills, and significant financial investment, but it was also an intimate activity because of its itinerant nature and it involved very few people. The intimacy of hunting and its seclusion away from the full assembly of the court meant that access was regulated and those in attendance had to be trusted. As such, the hunt was ideal for engaging in intimate conversations and interacting privately with courtiers and diplomats. Neighbors argues that the intimacy and seclusion of hunting enabled Queen Elizabeth I of England to exercise agency and engage in private politics with her councillors, foreign ambassadors, and leading courtiers. This research highlights how hunting was an active component in the development of political culture and the sociability of courts because it offered degrees of privacy.

The personal nature of European courts was key to why it was the epicentre of power, most especially because courtiers sought advancement or patronage, and dynastic networks relied on personal ties. Therefore, the key processes by which the court operated — favour, patronage, and personal relations — stemmed from being in close proximity to the sovereign and his family. Advancement, social capital and influence could only be obtained through being at court. This is because courts provided access in a myriad of ways to interact or engage with those in positions of power or with individuals who could access those in power.

The significance of the court as a site of political sociability and access for advancement is explored in Anna Penkała-Jastrzębska’s article ‘Noble Matrimonial Policy at the Royal Court in Dresden during the Reign of King Augustus the Strong (1697-1733): Public Affairs, Individual Interests’. Focusing on dynastic and familial alliances, and marital policies, Penkała-Jastrzębska explores how the Polish-Lithuanian nobility sought private relations not directly with European rulers, but with the European aristocracy at the ruler’s courts. By tapping into the political sociability inherent in European court culture, Penkała-Jastrzębska argues that it was the personal and familial relations at the Dresden court that enabled the Polish-Lithuanian nobility to forge private connections to secure advantageous marriages and political advancement. This research illustrates how European courts facilitated politicised privacy.

Conclusion

The 2020 ‘Privacy at Court’ conference and the contributions within this special issue have highlighted the increased interest in the concept of historical privacy and the viability of studying privacy at court. By investigating the phenomenon of privacy in the past, there are many situations where privacy was at times an intrinsic part of court culture (i.e., arcana imperii or surveillance), and at times a catalyst for public discourse and contention. However, there are challenges with exploring notions of privacy and the private at court. These challenges include the risk of anachronism, the variations of privacy according to different types of courts and cultures, and the fact that privacy at times was not entirely something to be considered in opposition to the public, but was instead merely semi-private.

In assessing the key take aways from this special issue, it is clear that the public and private divide continues to pose challenges and is not so easily separated. Nevertheless, the phenomenon of privacy is certainly evident across time and locations, though it existed in different ways and emerged for a variety of reasons. As such, privacy and the private must be analysed and discussed within their situational contexts. The study of historical privacy, in general, and the articles in this special issue in particular, do provide a few insights that shape our knowledge of court cultures. To begin, the personal nature of the courts and court cultures were only reinforced through politics and sociability. The combination of the personal, political, and social at court created informalities whereby historical privacy emerged as a means of accessing the sovereign and his or her families, or others in positions of authority, as exhibited in the articles by Muñoz and Penkała-Jastrzębska. At the same time, as Dyrmann and Neighbors demonstrate, the informalities and political sociability of courts did not just occur in the primary residences of rulers, they also existed and thrived at auxiliary residences or other courtly spaces, like the hunting forests or at the rural homes or estates of prominent courtiers. These locations served as remote courtly spaces and offered degrees of privacy.

In revisiting the opening example of the British monarchy and the modern-day court in conflict with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, and thinking comparatively about the case studies presented in each of the articles, it is possible to draw parallels between them. Perhaps one of the most interesting insights is how the courts and court cultures, along with the institution of monarchy across time, have institutionalised privacy. Conflicts emerge when this institutionalised privacy is compromised or under threat. More specifically, this conflict occurs when the unseen and private actions and behaviours are made public and conflict with public perception, or when private, personal interests supersede the common good. Another interesting parallel is that the practices and purposes of the royal and princely courts, past and present, are rooted in constructing and maintaining the ritual, imagery, iconography, reputation, and propaganda that communicates and displays the majesty and power of the sovereign. This construction and maintenance rely on and is shaped by politics and sociability, and the balance of public and private, which is reinforced by the continuous social and historical presence of court culture.

Perhaps the most crucial conclusion of this special issue is that the study of historical privacy helps us to refine our understanding of both the court and court cultures, including: the various ways in which early modern courts operated and were experienced; what constituted the court and determined its boundaries; and how contemporaries understood and demarcated privacy and the private within such court spaces. Through the examination of historical privacy at court, we expand what we know about the nuances and experiences of everyday life at court and illuminate the ways in which courts have cultural value, then and now.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dustin M. Neighbors

Dustin M. Neighbors

Dustin M. Neighbors is a postdoctoral researcher for the Fashion History Lab at Aalto University and a visiting researcher at the University of Helsinki. He completed his PhD at the University of York in 2018, under the supervision of Dr. John Cooper. A historian of early modern English and northern European history, Dustin specialises in the history of monarchy and court culture, with an emphasis on the performativity of gender, political culture, elite practices and activities (i.e., hunting) and utilising digital methods of analysis. He is lead co-editor on a forthcoming edited collection with Amsterdam University Press entitled Notions of Privacy at Early Modern European Courts: Reassessing the Public / Private Divide, 1400-1800.

Notes

1 Raisa Bruner, ‘Meghan Markle calls the British Royals, ‘The Firm’. Here’s why’, Time Magazine Online (9 March 2021).

2 Suyin Haynes, ‘How Meghan and Harry’s interview blew open the Monarchy’s troubled history with race’, Time Magazine Online (10 March 2021).

3 Laura Clancy, Running the Family Firm: How Monarchy Manages its Image and Our Money (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021), p. 18.

4 Clancy, Running the Family Firm, pp. 17-23.

5 Clancy, Running the Family Firm, pp. 35-6.

6 Harry and Meghan, directed by Liz Garbus, Archewell Productions, Netflix (2022). This dialogue occurs in episode three starting at 11:54 through to 13:43.

7 Harry and Meghan, episode 3, 11:54–13:43.

8 Harry and Meghan, episode 3, 11:54–13:43.

9 ‘Swedish King to face book’s love affair claims’, The Local – Sweden (3 November 2010). Eva Brems, ‘Gender and Monarchy in Belgium: Succession and the Exercise of Constitution and Symbolic Power’, Royal Studies Journal 7:2 (2020), pp. 76-7.

10 Beside this special issue of The Court Historian, another special is in development on ‘Privacy and the Eastern European Courts’, forthcoming in 2023/2024.

11 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1959), pp. 111-2 and 128-33. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Privacy at Court? Reconsidering the Public/Private Dichotomy’, in Notions of Privacy at Early Modern European Courts: Reassessing the Public/Private Divide, 1400-1800, eds. Dustin M. Neighbors, Lars Cyril Nørgaard and Elena Woodacre (Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming 2023).

12 John Adamson, ‘Introduction: The Making of the Ancien-Régime Court’, The Princely Courts of Europe, 1500-1700 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), pp. 7-8.

13 Mette Birkedal Bruun, ‘Towards an Approach to Early Modern Privacy: The Retirement of the Great Condé’, in Early Modern Privacy: Sources and Approaches, eds. Michaël Green, Lars Cyril Nørgaard, and Mette Birkedal Bruun (Leiden: Brill, 2021), p. 22.

14 Dustin M. Neighbors and Natacha Klein Käfer, ‘Zones of Privacy in Letters between Women of Power: Elizabeth I of England and Anna of Saxony’, Royal Studies Journal 9:1 (2022), p. 63.

15 David Starkey, ‘Innovation and Intimacy: The Rise of the Privy Chamber, 1485-1547’, in The English Court: From the War of the Roses to the Civil War, ed. David Starkey (Harlow: Longman Group UK Limited, 1987), p. 100.

16 Jill Lepore, ‘Privacy in an age of publicity’, The New Yorker (24 June 2013). Lloyd L. Weinreb, ‘The Right to Privacy’, The Right to Privacy, eds. E. F. Paul, F. D. Miller, Jr., and J. Paul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 27-8.

17 Early modern privacy has been the research focus at the Centre for Privacy Studies (PRIVACY) at the University of Copenhagen. Lars Cyril Nørgaard, ‘Past Privacy’, in Early Modern Privacy: Sources and Approaches, eds. Michaël Green, Lars Cyril Nørgaard, and Mette Birkedal Brunn (Leiden: Brill, 2021), p. 21. Bart van der Sloot and A. de Groot, ‘Introduction’, The Handbook of Privacy Studies (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), pp. 10-11. For early scholarship on privacy studies see Philippe Ariès, Histoire de la vie privée, vol. 3 – De la Renaissance aux Lumières (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1986). David Flaherty, Privacy in Colonial New England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972). Erica Longfellow, ‘Public, Private, and the Household in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, Journal of British Studies 45:2 (2006), p. 314.

18 S. Warren and L. Bradeis, ‘Right to Privacy’, Harvard Law Review 4:5 (1890), pp. 193-220.

19 Sjoerd Keulen and Ronald Kroeze, ‘Privacy from a Historical Perspective’, in The Handbook of Privacy Studies (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), p. 21.

20 Bruun, ‘Towards an Approach’, p. 13.

21 Bruun, ‘Towards an Approach’, p. 13.

22 Bruun, ‘Towards an Approach’, p. 14.

23 A.F. Westin, Privacy and Freedom (New York: Atheneum, 1970), p. 31. Bruun, ‘Towards an Approach’, p. 14. Keulen and Kroeze, ‘Privacy from a Historical Perspective’, p. 22.

24 Beat Kümin, ‘Introduction’, in Political Space in Pre-industrial Europe, ed. Beat Kümin (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), p. 14.

25 Charlotte Backerra, ‘Introduction: Rank and Ritual in the Early Modern Court’, The Court Historian 26:1 (2021), pp. 1-10. See also Ramy Youssef, ‘Status in Early Modern and Modern World Politics’, in Competition in World Politics: Knowledge, Strategies and Institutions, eds. Daniela Russ and James Stafford (Bielefeld: Verlag, 2021), pp. 39-41. Sebastian Olden-Jørgensen. ‘State Ceremonial, Court Culture and Political Power in Early Modern Denmark, 1536-1746’, Scandinavian Journal of History 27:2 (2002), pp. 65-76.

26 Erin Griffey, Early Modern Court Culture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022).

27 Ronald Asch, ‘Princely Court and Political Space in Early Modern Europe’, in Political Space in Pre-industrial Europe, ed. Beat Kümin (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), p. 59.

28 Dries Raeymaekers, One Foot in the Palace: The Habsburg Court of Brussels and the Politics of Access in the Reign of Albert and Isabella, 1598-1621 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2013). Dries Raeymaekers and Sebastiaan Derks, ‘Introduction’, in The Keys to Power: The Culture of Access in Princely Courts, 1400-1750 (Leiden: Brill, 2016), p. 7.

29 Bruun, ‘Towards an Approach’, p. 18.

30 Dustin M. Neighbors and Ellie Woodacre, ‘Agency within Privacy’, in Notions of Privacy at Early Modern European Courts: Reassessing the Public/Private Divide, 1400-1800, eds. Dustin M. Neighbors, Lars Cyril Nørgaard and Elena Woodacre (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming 2023).

31 Raeymaekers and Derks, ‘Introduction’, pp. 5-6.

32 Jeroen Duindam, Vienna and Versailles: The Courts of Europe’s Major Dynastic Rivals, 1550-1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 164 and 234.

33 John Adamson, ‘The Tudor and Stuart Courts, 1509-1714’, in The Princely Courts of Europe, 1500-1750, ed. John Adamson (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1999), pp. 108-10.

34 Duindam, Vienna and Versailles, p. 165.

35 Jeroen Duindam, ‘Introduction’, in Royal Courts in Dynastic States and Empires: A Global Perspective, eds. Jeroen Duindam, Tülay Artan and Metin Kunt (Leiden: Brill, 2011), p. 1.

36 Asch, ‘The Princely Court’, p. 43.

37 John Schofield, The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell (Stroud: The History Press, 2011).

38 Karin Sennefelt, ‘A Discerning Eye: Visual Culture and Social Distinction in Early Modern Stockholm’, Cultural and Social History 12:2 (2015), pp. 180-1.

39 Nicola Clark, ‘Queen Katherine Howard: Space, Place, and Promiscuity Pre- and Post-Marriage, 1536-1541’, Royal Studies Journal 6:2 (2019), p. 103.

40 For a discussion of the use of alcoves for privacy, see Catherine Liu, ‘The Wall, the Window, and the Alcove: Visualising Privacy’, Surveillance and Society 9:1/2 (2011), pp. 208-9. The reference to the building of private rooms for country residences is based on Maurice Howard’s analysis of the Tudor country house, see Maurice Howard, The Early Tudor Country House: Architecture and Politics, 1490-1550 (London: George Philip, 1987), p. 108. For a broader look at identifying variations of historical privacy, spatial demarcations, and social reasons for engaging in privacy, see Lena Cowen Orlin, Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 68-70.

41 Dustin M. Neighbors, ‘“With my ruling”: Agency, Queenship and Political Culture through Royal Progresses in the Reign of Elizabeth I’, (unpublished PhD thesis, University of York, 2018), p. 25.

42 Starkey, ‘Innovation and Intimacy’, p. 100.

43 Elaine Chalus, ‘Elite Woman, Social Politics, and the Political World of Late Eighteenth-Century England’, The Historical Journal 43:3 (2000), p. 673.

44 Johanna Möller and Leyla Dogruel, ‘Localizing the Politics of Privacy in Communication and Media’, Media and Communication 8:2 (2020), p. 237.

45 Aleksandra Samonek, ‘How is Political Privacy Different from Personal Privacy? An Argument from Democratic Governance’, Diametros 18:70 (2021), p. 65. Westin, Privacy and Freedom, p. 431. Dorota Mokrosinska, ‘Privacy and Autonomy: On Some Misconceptions Concerning the Political Dimensions of Privacy’, Law and Philosophy 37 (2018), p. 117.

46 David P. Baron, ‘Private Politics, Corporate Social Responsibility, and Integrated Strategy', Journal of Economics and Management Strategy 10:1 (2001), pp. 7-45. For references to the variations of political privacy in a general context see Martin A. van Bakel, Renée R. Hagenstejn and Pieter van de Velde, Private Politics: A Multidisciplinary Approach to ‘Big Man' Systems (Leiden: Brill, 1986); John Watts, King Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 2 and 87; and Colin Bennett, ‘Privacy in the Political System: Perspectives from Political Science and Economics’, in Ethical, Legal and Social Issues (ELSI) component of the Human Genome Project (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Energy, 2001).

47 Evelyn Rawski, The Last Emperors (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 161.

48 Asch, ‘The Princely Courts’, p. 55.

49 Gary Deen Peterson, Warrior Kings of Sweden: The Rise of an Empire in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company Inc., Publishers, 2007), p. 198. Susanna Åkerman, Queen Christina of Sweden and her Circle: The Transformation of a Seventeenth-Century Philosophical Libertine (Leiden: Brill, 1991), pp. 29-30.

50 Peterson, Warrior Kings, p. 198. Oskar Garstein, Rome and the Counter-Reformation in Scandinavia: The Age of Gustavus Adolphus and Queen Christina of Sweden, 1622-1656 (Leiden: Brill, 1992), p. 594.

51 In dealing with the ambiguity and broad scope connecting politics and privacy, the diagram of the ‘lenses of privacy’ was developed during a fellowship with the Centre for Privacy Studies (PRIVACY) at the University of Copenhagen. Through conversations with the Director and colleagues at PRIVACY, this model for approaching political privacy emerged and was officially presented during a workshop on 4 December 2019. Currently, there is an analytical process that accompanies the model that will become available in a future publication in due course.

52 Jacqueline Rose, The Politics of Counsel in England and Scotland, 1286-1707 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 18.

53 Sebastian Beck, ‘Economic Espionage in the Early Modern Period’, in Spies, Espionage and Secret Diplomacy in the Early Modern Period, eds. Guido Braun and Susanne Lachenicht (Stuttgart: Verlag W Kohlhammer, 2021), pp. 39-40. András Kiséry, ‘Diplomatic Knowledge on Display: Foreign Affairs in the Early Modern English Public Sphere’, in Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early Modern World, eds. Tracey Sowerby and Joanna Craigwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 147-8 and 152-4.

54 Malcolm Smuts, Political Culture, the State and the Problem of Religious War in Britain and Ireland, 1578-1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), pp. 576-9.

55 Starkey, ‘Innovation and Intimacy’, p. 100.

56 Peter Lake and Steve Pincus, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England’, Journal of British Studies 45:2 (2012), p. 276.

57 Elizabeth Hodgson, ‘Failed Alliances and Miserable Marriages in Katherine Philip’s Letters’, in The Politics of Female Alliance in Early Modern England, eds. Christina Luckyj, Niamh J. O’Leary, Allyson Poska and Abby Zanger (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017), p. 89.

58 Susan Wiseman, ‘“Public”, “Private”, “Politics”: Elizabeth Poole, the Duke of Monmouth, “Political Thought” and “Literary Evidence”’, Women’s Writing 14:2 (2007), p. 357.

59 Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 12.

60 Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal, pp. 6-7.

61 Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal, pp. 50-7.

62 Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal, p. 73.

63 David Starkey, ‘Introduction: Court History in Perspective’, in The English Court: From the War of the Roses to the Civil War, ed. David Starkey, (Harlow: Longman Group UK Limited, 1987), pp. 8-9.

64 John Adamson, ‘Introduction: The Making of the Ancien-Régime Court, 1500-1700’, in The Princely Courts of Europe, 1500-1750, ed. John Adamson (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1999), p. 7; Erin, Griffey, ‘Introduction’, in Early Modern Court Culture, ed. Erin Griffey (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022), pp. 2-3.

65 Kümin, ‘Introduction’, p. 13.

66 Neighbors, ‘“With my ruling”’, pp. 188 and 218-20. Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (London: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 32-3.

67 See also Neil Samman, ‘The Progresses of Henry VIII, 1509-1529’, in The Reign of Henry VIII: Politics, Policy and Piety, ed. Diarmaid MacCulloch (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 59-73. Mary Hill Cole, The Portable Queen: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Ceremony (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999). Robert Knecht, Hero or Tyrant? Henry III, King of France, 1574-89 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), p. 186.

68 Kümin, ‘Introduction’, p. 12.

69 Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox, Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 5.

70 Asch, ‘The Princely Court’, p. 50.

71 Kümin, ‘Introduction’, pp. 13-4.

72 Asch, ‘The Princely Court’, p. 60.

73 Kümin, ‘Introduction’, p. 9.