Royal Jokes and Sovereign Mystery in Castiglione and Marguerite de Navarre

When the emperor Caligula let it be known that he might propose his horse as consul, he aimed in part to remind Rome's equestrian order (from equus , or "horse") that it had long since been mastered by her emperors. ¹ Humiliating as it must have been for the senators to contemplate a horse sidling up to them as peer and stablemate, the deeper bite of this practical joke lay in its mockery of their pretensions to republican entitlement. The present essay examines the interest taken by early modern princes and courtly humanists, steeped in the classical tradition, in autocratic jests: acts of play that seek to renegotiate the relationship between the liberties of subjects and royal prerogatives. My exemplary texts, the Cortegiano (1528) of Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529) and the Heptaméron (1558) of Marguerite de Navarre (1492-1549), rehearse and comment on the games that two kings, hoping to secure autocratic rule but avoid open despotism, play with sovereign mercy. ² The princes are Alfonso I of Aragon (1385-1458), known equally for his conquest of Naples and his patronage of the arts, and François I (1494-1547), under whom the Valois court flourished and the parlements struggled as he worked to centralize the corporate model of French sovereignty in his own person. ³

During their courtly dialogues Castiglione and de Navarre unfold a common scenario: faced with a grave threat from within his own household, a king declines the punishing resources of the law and instead plays a joke on his treacherous servant. ⁴ In the Cortegiano a servant pilfers the rings of Alfonso, who refrains from comment for nearly a year before at last responding with a cryptic jest. The stakes are higher in the Heptaméron , for the traitor is a celebrated warrior, the plot is assassination, and the threatened king is de Navarre's own brother. The course of action taken by François is even more suspenseful and elaborately playful than the one taken by Alfonso. In each tale an aura of mystery surrounds the narrative of the king's choice of an ambiguous jest over punishment by law or royal pardon, the standard extralegal means of exercising the monarch's prerogatives. ⁵ The mystery has less to do with tricks of plot and motive than with arcana imperii : on the heels of an assault on the theory of sacred kingship implied by the servant's criminal attempt on the king's person or property, each king seeks to restore and augment his sovereign mystery.

At issue in the autocratic jest is the king's relationship to the law, a concern in political philosophy that grew more urgent as early modern kings sought to broaden their authority. In France, for example, Claude de Seyssel argued that justice was a "bridle" placed on the king as a protection against despotism; Guillaume Budé maintained, on the contrary, that kings "are in no way subject to the laws and ordinances of their realm" [ne sont point subjectz aux lois et aux ordonnances de leur royaume]. ⁶ The stories told by Castiglione and de Navarre suggest the oblique ways in which Alfonso and François, refusing to surrender the protection of their sovereign persons to the law, personally enter into constitutional debate. Brushing aside the local circumstance of crime by servants, Alfonso and François direct their attention to the rules of sovereignty itself, which they explore in a game convened, so to speak, at the king's pleasure. In this game the servant is a pawn rather than an opponent; the sole property (figurative or literal) required is a sheathed sword, representing the force of law, placed at the monarch's disposal.

The image of the sword of law, grasped in the powerful but restrained hand of an absolutist ruler, comes to Alfonso and François from a variety of sources...