Search Results

Chapter Six studies to a genre that has often been understood as celebrating exactly the sort of voluntary enslavement that writers like Wroth examined: the Caroline masque. This chapter suggests that the politics of court entertainments look very different when we read them in terms of the erotic tradition traced in this book. To this end, this chapter examines several masques of the 1630s: Jonson’s Chloridia, Townshend’s Tempe Restored, Carew’s Coelum Britannicum, and Davenant’s Salmacida Spolia. It is usual to read Caroline spectacles as promoting a theory of monarchal absolutism. This chapter maintains instead that these masques function as a form of counsel for both Charles I and his elite subjects. On the one had, they remind Charles of the Elizabethan principle that kings rule with the consent of their people. On the other, these masques’ Petrarchan view of love warns subjects that the affection that should distinguish king from tyrant may just as easily convert loyal service into helpless slavery.

This chapter contextualizes the composition of Leviathan by placing that text within the religious debates roiling the English Revolution in the aftermath of the regicide. It demonstrates how Hobbes's interest in Erastianism peaked during these years, as did his appreciation for Independency as a church form. These developments are set against a historical backdrop in which Oliver Cromwell and the Independents rose to power within post-regicidal England. Hobbes's intellectual development estranged him from the royalist cause, and ensured his fall from grace at the exiled court of the Stuarts. Hobbes offended both of the main royalist factions: the old royalists grouped around Edward Hyde, and the Louvre group royalists around Henrietta Maria.

Henrietta Maria and her daughter Mary Stuart arrived in The Hague, the latter to be presented to her new husband, William II. There were rumours of a possible Catholic plot to assassinate Elizabeth. Henrietta Maria would remain in The Hague for almost a year, as she would combine the delivery of William’s bride with rather more pressing affairs. Henrietta Maria set to her primary task, raising money to aid the Royalist war efforts. She was intent on pawning a collection of crown jewels, including the anchor jewel Buckingham had pawned to Frederick V in 1625 and which was redeemed in 1637 – by 1642 it was in Henrietta Maria’s possession. Rupert and Maurice joined the Royalists and fought for their uncle, with no little success, while in August 1642 Charles Louis, with different sympathies, finally tired of the situation and left his uncle’s side. Roe returned to England from his futile sojourn at Ratisbonne and found a country at war. Both sides wished for Elizabeth to act as mediatrix. Even though two of her sons were in active military service for the Royalists, Elizabeth, ever pragmatic, tried to appear as neutral as she could. After all, Parliament were still paying her pension. The appearance of Elizabeth’s niece Mary had an unexpected upside, as her court bolstered Elizabeth’s struggle for social supremacy with Amalia von Solms: there were now two Stuart courts in The Hague. Elizabeth lost two close friends: her mother-in-law and Sir Thomas Roe.

This chapter looks at the period 1790–1811. It argues that the French Revolution and subsequent wars with France created a sense of national emergency that caused writers such as Hannah More, Sarah Trimmer, Jane West, Henrietta Maria Bowdler, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld to try to defend their nation and religion by venturing into traditionally male areas of theology and politics. These years marked a turn in popular opinion against women’s involvement in politics and print culture, so the women I discuss were trying to fulfil what they understood to be their ‘Christian profession’ at a time when the extent of female activity was being curtailed. (This is evident in the very proper Britannias who appear during these years contrasted with a Medusa-haired, rampaging French Liberty.) The writers I discuss negotiated the constraints of propriety by being published anonymously, pseudonymously, or posthumously.

This chapter uses the relationship between King Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria to examine how perceptions of marital intimacies informed debates over political intellection in the mid-seventeenth century. Royalist defenses of the king and queen’s correspondence emphasize the necessary intimacy of a couple’s mutual thoughts as foundational to any healthy marriage, arguments that had their roots in long-standing cultural expectations regarding the equality that should attend marital decision-making. While supportive of conversational intimacy, John Milton’s ambivalence toward this argument’s political implications would lead him to emphasize masculine headship in ways more consonant with Parliament’s presumptive position as the primary source of deliberative authority within the nation. Milton’s depiction in Paradise Lost of a world in which individuals cannot fully control the reception and distribution of their inner thoughts seems deliberately calibrated to rebut royalist claims regarding the king and queen’s marriage advanced in the aftermath of the Naseby debacle.

Chapter 3 analyses Charles’s 1634 progress through the North Midlands with Queen Henrietta Maria. Stretching as far north as Nottingham, this progress was more private than that of 1633, as Charles opted to focus more on visits to, and the cultivation of his relationships with, members of the regional nobility. This included a second visit to William Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle, at Welbeck Abbey and another specially-commissioned Ben Jonson progress entertainment, performed at Bolsover Castle: The King and Queen’s Entertainment at Bolsover. During the six-day visit to Cavendish, both the earl and a group of discontented local miners sought to take advantage of the travelling monarch’s presence to petition the king in person. Paying particular attention to Charles’s concentration on visits to noble houses, and the extended visit to Welbeck, the chapter reflects further on Charles’s accessibility to his subjects and his readiness to engage in ceremonial dialogue with them.

Chapter 9 considers incidences of direct contact with Leonardo’s works by Britons abroad and at the Caroline court in London; that is, first-hand experience of the artist. Although the opportunity to view or handle drawings, manuscripts, or paintings attributed to Leonardo was extremely rare, an examination of the wider matrix of these experiences provides a sense of a less tangible aspect of the early English reception. Key episodes include: Charles, Prince of Wales and Leonardo’s codices belonging to Juan de Espina (Madrid, 1623); George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, Rubens, and Leonardo’s Mona Lisa (Paris, 1625); Queen Henrietta Maria, Inigo Jones, and ‘Ginevra de’ Benci’ (London, 1636); Abraham van der Doort, Roger de Plessis, Duke of Liancourt, and Leonardo’s St John the Baptist (London, 1630); John Evelyn (Paris, 1644). The chapter concludes with a discussion of three works attributed to Leonardo or his immediate followers documented in the Caroline Royal Collection before 1639.

On 16 October 1624, Elizabeth Stuart gave birth to her eighth child and sixth son, Edward. Not long afterwards, on 4 January 1625, Frederick and Elizabeth’s fourth son, Louis, died while teething – the first child they had lost and had to bury on foreign, that is, Dutch, soil. Elizabeth’s grief was great, but there was more to come. Maurice, Prince of Orange, who had in many ways been a second father to Elizabeth, was gravely ill, and this led directly to her lady-in-waiting Amalia von Solms marrying Frederick Henry, the prince’s half-brother, to secure the succession of the House of Nassau. Mansfeld, meanwhile, had gathered an army in England to relieve the Palatinate, but he was refused permission to travel through France, and ended up in the United Provinces. Mansfeld had no option other than to assist the Dutch in relieving Breda, which was besieged by the Spanish. Elizabeth suffered more bereavements as both Maurice and James died - it is clear that while Elizabeth viewed her father’s death in part as an opportunity, as her brother Charles was far more belligerent when it came to the Spanish, the death of her ‘second father’ Maurice, affected her more deeply. Charles married Henrietta Maria, who brought with her a massive dowry which could pay for a serious campaign to relieve the Palatinate. This is what Elizabeth relied on as Mansfeld’s army was all but destroyed during the failed attempt to relieve the Dutch at Breda, which fell to the Spanish.

During the civil war, the publication of captured correspondence developed into a literary and political genre of its own, one in which interception and revelation became essential components of that material’s polemical effect and helped inform the publication and reception of more elevated correspondence. Early controversies regarding the capture and review of royal and royalist correspondence by Parliament established interpretative paradigms regarding personal and institutional liberty that would subsequently inform the famous controversy over the publication of royal letters captured at the Battle of Naseby. In particular, the publication of intercepted letters offered Parliament opportunities to reassert both its conciliar prerogatives and its traditional role as guarantor of the nation’s liberties. In response, Charles and his advisors sought instead to align interpretative authority with authorial intent, binding the meaning of a letter’s content to its individual origins rather than submitting to more public and potentially variable processes of reading.

Chapter 15 investigates the circumstances around the apparent absence of the Salvator Mundi in the collection of King James II, with a particular focus on events in the immediate aftermath of the ‘Revolution’ of 1688. A number of possibilities present themselves. Did the painting pass out of the Royal Collection before the accession of James II in 1685? Did the dowager queen, Henrietta Maria, take it to a property of her jointure, or to France? Was the painting taken to Portugal by Queen Catherine of Braganza after the death of Charles II? This chapter considers the evidence of a key witness to events, and whether a painting described as a ‘Head of Our Saviour’, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, sold out of the collection of the Duke of Buckingham in 1763, can be identified with the painting recorded in the collections of Charles I and Charles II. If so, by which route did it leave the Royal Collection and enter the Buckingham collection?

Chapter 7 opens the third section of the book, which discusses the collecting and reception of Leonardo da Vinci in Stuart Britain. The chapter summarizes the key documentation, placing it in historical context. It focuses on the presence of two paintings of Christ, as Salvator Mundi, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci documented in the collection of King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria. It reviews the historical backdrop of seventeenth-century England, outlining the key documentation of the two paintings, and signals the central problems: how can we distinguish between these two paintings, and can they be identified? The chapter discusses the sale of the royal art collection, 1649–53, and its documentation, and introduces the individuals through whose hands the two paintings passed.

Chapter 11 considers access to Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi in England c. 1630–50. It proposes that the painting was inaccessible in the queen’s private apartments in the 1630s, which accounts for its invisibility in surviving documentation and its escape of campaigns of iconoclasm focused on royal chapels during the civil wars of the 1640s. It proposes the painting first came into public view in 1649, when it was put on display at the Commonwealth Sale. This is attested by lists prepared for foreign buyers by agents in London. The chapter expands to include works attributed to Leonardo from the collection of Charles I, in the hands of French and Flemish dealers in the 1650s.