Précieuses at the Court of T Charles I. By J. B. Fletcher Assistant Professor in Harvard University may be an HE Court of James I., less licentious than that of his grandson, Charles II., was far grosser. James himself set the tone of brutal crudity of speech and manners. The notorious orgy at the Entertainment at Theobald's to Christian of Denmark in 1606 extreme, but is by no means an uncharacteristic illustration of the grossness of the times. Nor was Sir John Harington, to whose graphic letter we have knowledge of the orgy, a Puritan. On the contrary, about fifteen years earlier he had been disciplined by Elizabeth for certain scabrous writings of his own. But these had been at least partially redeemed by wit, whereas the gaieties at Theobalds were merely bestial. His letter to Mr. Secretary Barlow' is well known, and need not be transcribed here. Certainly, after perusing it, one sympathizes with the regretful comment of the disgusted gentleman: "I have much marvelled at these strange pageantries, and they do bring to my remembrance what passed of this sort in our Queen's days; of Nug. Antiq. London, 1804. I. 348 seq. which I was sometime an humble presenter and assistant: but I ne'er did see such lack of good order, discretion, and sobriety as I have now done." Later in the same remarkable letter, speaking more generally: "I will now, in good sooth, declare to you, who will not blab, that the gunpowder fright' is got out of all our heads, and we are going on, hereabouts, as if the devil was contriving every man should blow up himself, by wild riot, excess and devastation of time and temperance. The great ladies do go well-masked, and indeed it be the only show of their modesty, to conceal their countenance; but alack they meet with such countenance to uphold their strange doings, that I marvel not at ought that happens." The need of some refining influence at court was obvious and urgent. Naturally, courtiers like Harington, gentlemen at bottom, might have looked to the ladies of the court for such a refining influence. And, if the consensus of poets may be trusted, among these others, masked courtesans in the derived as well as primitive meaning of the word, there were not wanting women of fine breeding and high-toned feeling. The Queen, Anne of Denmark, seems herself to have been a worthy woman, "generally well wished:"2 as the phrase in the time ran. The Lady Arabella Stuart wrote of her in 1603:3 " . . . if ever thear 2 The Gunpowder Plot, 1605. * Scandal in Scotland, to be sure, had associated her name with The Progresses, etc., of King James I. London, weare such a vertu as curtesy at the Court, I marvell what is becom of it, for I protest I see little or none of it but in the Queene, etc." Anne appears, however, to have been something of a cypher at court. Of the rest, Lucy Harrington, Countess of Bedford, unquestionably from her house at Twickenham exercised the widest refining influence. Enthusiastic testimonies to her are to be found in the works of Donne, Drayton, Ben Jonson, Samuel Daniel and others. In Donne's Verse-Epistles to her, especially, there are forehints of the Platonizing cult which is to become explicit in the next generation. Madam," he exclaims: You have refined me, and to worthiest things- In another Epistle more generally: You, or your virtue, two vast uses serves ; It ransoms one sex, and one court preserves. That Donne may have had in mind the Italianate doctrine of Platonic, or rather neo-Platonic, Love,' is suggested by the apparent allusion in the following Epistle to the "myth of the cave" in Plato's Republic, Bk. VII. Donne is addressing Catharine Howard, Countess of Salisbury; he has compared her to a book in which all wisdom and virtue may be learned, and adds: I Systematically expounded by Card. Bembo, Castiglione's mouthpiece in Il Cortegiano, Book IV. It is virtually a sermon on the text: "The end of desire is the beginning of wisdom," applied specifically to love. Cf. Rosi, Saggio sui Trattati d'Amore del Cinquecento, 1899. Nor lack I light to read this book, though I Other great ladies might be named, who in their own lives and circles more or less publicly rebuked the indecent coarseness of court manners; but during James's lifetime, another personal trait of the Scottish "Solomon" militated against any sway at court of feminine influences, except those which pandered to "the brutal sex." James himself despised women almost as cordially as he did tobacco, and rarely lost an opportunity of insulting them. Above all, women who aspired to control men enraged him. Ben Jonson caters to this mood in his Masque of the Metamorphosed Gipsies, 1621, in a kind of mock-litany. Patrico intones : A smock rampant and the itches And the chorus responds: Bless the sovereign and bis Seeing. Towards the end of James's life, his well-known antipathy to women who aspired beyond the household seems to have led to a sort of anti-feminist crusade. A letter of 1619-20 records: "Our pulpits ring continually of the insolence and impudence of women; and to help forward, the players have likewise taken them to task, and so to the ballads and ballad-singers, so that they can come nowhere but their ears tingle. And if all this will not serve, the King threatens to fall upon their husbands, parents, or friends, that have or should have power over them, and make them pay for it." James was a sentimental man,2 as gushing letters to his "master-mistresses," Carr and Villiers, amply prove; he was a doting father, but he rarely vouchsafed a tender word to any woman. His son, Charles, however, united with his father's sentimentality a romantic passion for women in general, and for his French wife in particular, which made possible the taunt of his enemies later that he was "woman-led.” Whatever cold policy may have actuated Buckingham, Charles's attitude in the famous opera bouffe quest of the Spanish Infanta was that of a young knight errant. Nor was Charles, like his son, ever cynical in his gallantries. He is said to have blushed like a girl at coarse language. He had many quarrels with the capriciously wayward Henrietta Maria, mainly from jealousy of other women's influence over her; but no serious charge has ever been made, even by his PuriNichols, op. cit. III. 588. Mr. Chamberlain to Sir Dudley Carleton. An instance of this prying of the King into the domestic business of his subjects is recorded in Nichols, op. cit. III. 529. The same Chamberlain writes to the same Carleton: "The King was pleased with his (Sir George Calvert's) answer and modesty, and sending for him, asked many questions, most about his wife. His answer was, that she was a good woman, and had brought him ten children; and would assure his Majesty, that she was not a wife with a witness. This and some other passages of I this kind seem to show that the King is in a great vein of taking down high-handed women." 2 An effeminate man, also, as proved by his contemporary agnomen of "Queen James," in contradistinction to "King Elizabeth." |