Ritual, Law, and Faction at the Early Stuart Court: Chapman’s Memorable Maske and the Palatine Wedding

Abstract

The court wedding festivities for the marriage of Frederick, the Elector Palatine, and Princess Elizabeth Stuart in 1613 included the performance of ‘Memorable Masque’ by George Chapman. Chapman’s masque provides a window into the factional ideological conflicts of the early Jacobean court and particularly the contested nature of James’s ‘absolute’ authority in relation to the law. While Chapman’s presentation superficially appeared to support the King’s assertion that royal authority is above the law, the pliability of the masque form allowed for him to endorse a militant foreign policy position at odds with the King’s and even more subtly critique James’s absolutist view of royal authority. More broadly, this performance demonstrates some of the ways court ceremonial and festive occasions could be manipulated for political and ideological purposes.

Notes

1 See David Lindley, ‘Courtly Play. The Politics of Chapman’s The Memorable Masque’, in Eveline Cruickshanks (ed.), The Stuart Courts (Gloucestershire, 2000), pp. 43-58; Martin Butler, The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture (Cambridge, 2009).

2 George Chapman, The Memorable Maske of the two Honorable Houses or Inns of Court; the Middle Temple, and Lyncolns Inne (London, 1613), sig., B1r-B1v.

3 Chapman, Memorable Maske, sig., C2r.

4 Chapman, Memorable Maske, sig., D1r.

5 Chapman, Memorable Maske, sig., D3v.

6 Chapman, Memorable Maske, sig., D3v.

7 Chapman, Memorable Maske, sig., D4v.

8 Chapman, Memorable Maske, sig., D4v.

9 Chapman, Memorable Maske, sig., E1r.

10 Chapman, Memorable Maske, sig., E3r.

11 Butler, Stuart Court Masque, p. 201.

12 Lawrence Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–1641 (Oxford, 1965), p. 82. See also Norman Egbert McClure (ed.), The Letters of John Chamberlain (Philadelphia, 1939), vol. I, p. 325.

13 Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, p. 90. Stone quotes from an Oxford MS. I have modernized the spelling.

14 Kevin Curran, Marriage, Performance and Politics at the Jacobean Court (Surrey, 2009), p. 113.

15 Mark Thornton Burnett, ‘Chapman, George (1559/60–1634)’, in H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). These ideas might tie more generally to opposition to James’s ideas for Anglo-Scottish union, but this project was pretty much dead by 1613. Anthony Weldon makes much of the ‘beggarly Scots’ at court but I would not like to cite exclusively from this particularly biased observer. Conrad Russell cites John Holles’s complaints about Scottish competition for offices in Conrad Russell, ‘James VI and I and Rule Over Two Kingdoms: An English View’, Historical Research 76 (2003), pp. 151-63, p. 156.

16 Chapman, Memorable Maske, sig., C1v.

17 Chapman, Memorable Maske, sig., C1v. According to the OED, justing is another term for jousting. ‘jousting | justing, n’.. ‘joust | just, v.’. OED Online, Oxford University Press.

18 Carr was a page delivering the device of Lord Hay to the King when his horse threw him: G.P.V. Akrigg, Jacobean Pageant (Cambridge, 1962), pp. 177-80.

19 Chapman, Memorable Maske, sig., C2v-C3r.

20 Chapman, Memorable Maske, sig., C3v-C1r.

21 Phelips, a reader in the Middle Temple and speaker of the House of Commons, was best known for his role as the King’s sergeant in the prosecution of the Gunpowder Plotters. He was connected to Prince Henry’s household as the Chancellor of the duchy of Cornwall. Hobart, connected to Lincoln’s Inn, had been appointed Attorney General over Francis Bacon in 1606 and had been the main spokesman for the Great Contract on behalf of the Crown in the 1610 session of Parliament. He was one of the first men to receive the new title of baronet in 1611 and was appointed chancellor of Prince Henry’s household in 1612. Furthermore, Hobart himself had been a member of the House of Commons committee on the Virginia Company. Chapman himself had served as ‘sewer-in-ordinary’ in the household. Stuart Handley, ‘Sir Henry Hobart’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/1339.

22 David Lindley, ‘Courtly Play’, p. 51; Roy Strong, Henry Prince of Wales and England’s Lost Renaissance (London, 2000), p. 132.

23 Strong, Henry Prince of Wales, pp. 51-2.

24 Strong, Henry Prince of Wales, pp. 54-5.

25 Curran, Marriage, Performance, and Politics, p. 110.

26 Butler, Stuart Court Masques, p. 201.

27 Butler, Stuart Court Masques, p. 203.

28 Butler, Stuart Court Masques, p. 203.

29 Butler, Stuart Court Masques, p. 204.

30 Curran, Marriage, Performance, and Politics, pp. 110-11.

31 Lindley, ‘Courtly Play’, p. 49.

32 Chapman, Memorable Maske, sig., D1v.

33 Chapman, Memorable Maske, sig., D1v.

34 Chapman, Memorable Maske, sig., D1v.

35 Chapman, Memorable Maske, sig., D1v.

36 Chapman, Memorable Maske, sig., D2r.

37 Chapman, Memorable Maske, sig., D2v.

38 Chapman, Memorable Maske, sig., D2v.

39 Lindley, ‘Courtly Play’, pp. 49-52.

40 James VI and I, ‘Speech to Parliament of 21 March 1610’, in Johann P. Sommerville (ed.), Political Writings (Cambridge, 1994), p. 181.

41 James VI and I, ‘Speech to Parliament, 1610’, p. 181.

42 Chapman, Memorable Maske, sig., D3v.

43 Chapman, Memorable Maske, sig., D3v.

44 Chapman, Memorable Maske, sig., D3v.

45 Chapman, Memorable Maske, sig., D4r.

46 Chapman, Memorable Maske, sig., D4v.

47 Patricia H. Pascoe, ‘The Political Ideas and the Historical Background of the French Tragedies of George Chapman’, PhD diss. (University of Denver, 1982), p. 186; Burnett, ‘Chapman, George’.

48 Glen Mynott, ‘“We must not be more true to kings / than Kings are to their subjects”: France and the Politics of the Ancient Constitution in Chapman’s Byron Plays’, Renaissance Studies 9 (1995), p. 477.

49 Mynott, ‘We must not be more true to kings / than Kings are to their subjects’, p. 488.

50 George Garnett (ed.), Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 21-2, 37-46.

51 Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos, p. 98.

52 Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos, pp. 97-8.

53 Mynott, ‘We must not be more true to kings / than Kings are to their subjects’, p. 485.

54 Chapman, Memorable Maske, sig., A3v.

55 James VI and I, ‘The Trew Law of Free Monarchies’, in Sommerville (ed.), Political Writings, p. 75.

56 James VI and I, ‘Speech to Parliament of 21 March 1610’, Sommerville (ed.), Political Writings, p. 183. Jenny Wormald argues that by 1610 James had begun to remould some of his views on kingship as they were stated in his earlier Basilikon Doron and The Trew Law of Free Monarchies for an English (as opposed to the Scottish) context and that this 1610 speech to Parliament was much more favourably received than his books were in 1603. However, the assertion that kings should act in accordance with the law but were fundamentally above it remained intact. James’s actions made it difficult to distinguish between theory and practice, causing confusion and frustration among many MPs and other subjects. Jenny Wormald, ‘James VI and I, Basilikon Doron and The Trew Law of Free Monarchies’, in Linda Levy Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 52-3.

57 Elizabeth Read Foster (ed.), Proceedings in Parliament 1610, 2 vols (New Haven, 1966), vol. II, p. 192.

58 Foster (ed.), Proceedings in Parliament 1610, vol. II, p. 193.

59 Foster (ed.), Proceedings in Parliament 1610, vol. II, p. 196.

60 Foster (ed.), Proceedings in Parliament 1610, vol. II, pp. 199-200.

61 Glenn Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (New Haven, 1996), p. 136-62.

62 Burgess, Absolute Monarchy, p. 162-3.

63 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Volume 2: The Age of Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 184.

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Nathan w. Perry

Nathan W. Perry

Nathan Perry teaches history at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.