Courtiers, Writers, and Sages

REVIEW ARTICLE Courtiers, Writers, and Sages During that All-Hallown summer of pre-Civil War England, in 1632, the artists Stalbempt and Belcamp painted a "conversation piece" showing Charles I and his court in the park at Greenwich. This picture, reproduced in Gervas Huxley's Endymion Porter: The Life of a Courtier (London: Chatto & Windus [Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Company Limited]' 1959, pp. 344, $5.50), shows the royal trio-King, Queen, and tiny Prince Charlesin stately miniature upon a gentle pastoral slope, surrounded by courtly councillors, Hamilton, Weston, Arundel-and Endymion Porter, courtier, patron of poets, cultural plenipotentiary to the royal connoisseur, gross and graceful in white satin, leaning. like the other gentlemen, upon a sword-stick soon to bend before the ironsides. It is all charming, this filigree of conciliar elegance, the hieroglyph of a doomed order in which civil forms, imitating art, died of their own inane incompetence and perished in pathetic splendour, in forlorn cavalry charges over soggy fields, in bright jewels huddled hastily in leathern wallets, and night passages over the narrow seas. Mr. Huxley tells a plain unvarnished story; reproof or nostalgia is not in his line (be is, after all, the social historian of tea), but his subject, even if a plain man in his way, is a symbolic figure too. His name in baptism, Endymion-how appropriate for one wbo played his role in Prince Charles's fantastic courtship of the Infanta Maria Anna in 1623, hovered in the periphery of the ritual of Platonic love cultivated at the court of Charles, and w·rote realms of explanatory and passionate correspondence to his lunar and jealous wife Olive. A sad shepherd, his vast expenses met by grants and monopolies of the kind which enraged the parliamentary reformers, his loyal and useful function destroyed in revolution, the pictures he had bought sold again abroad, he died and with him a whole era of elegant artifice, during which a significant proportion of the English gentry was indelibly civilized, wedded by couplets, canvases, and marbles to the Europe which their Protestant grandfathers had with insular piety rejected. Porter had a seat at Suckling's "Sessions of the Poets," and was the patron of Thomas May and the lord of William D'Avenant's muse and heart, as that grandiloquent cavalier expressed it. Half a century before, the young Spenser, ambitious and already touched by a melancholy first conventional and later constitutional, had observed bitterly: But ah Mecoenas is yclad in claye, And great Augustus long ygoe is dead: Vol. XXIX, No.3, April, 1960 COURTIERS, WRITERS, AND SAGES And all the worthies liggen wrapt in Jeade, That matter made for Poets on to play. 399 In those fifty years the institution of patronage had become obsolescent: for all the fictions and hyperboles of prefaces, it was no longer a profitahle and safe arrangement but a free-enterprise market, where some few writers prospered and others, bankrupt upon "commodities," fed the muse upon publishers' scraps. In the literary world, as in others, the death of Prince Henry was thought of as a catastrophe, for he showed signs of uniting in himself the political beneficence of Leicester and the gracious oversight of Lucy, Countess of Bedford, whom Jonson called "the Life of the Muses day." Observing in general that Elizabethan patronage was "capricious and erratic," Edwin Haviland Miller, in his The Professional Writer in Elizabethan England (Harvard University Press [Toronto: S. J. Reginald Saunders & Company Limitedl, 1959, pp. xiv, 282, $6.50), which is a well-documented successor to Phoebe Sheavyn's Literary Profession in the Elizabethan Age (1909) , describes the emergence and recognition of the writing profession chiefly in the critical period of the 1590's, the expansion of the book-trade, and the reception of middle-class standards by popular propagandists and entertainers. A central figure in any such discussion is Ben Jonson, who "every first day of the new year ... had twenty pounds sent him from the Earl of Pembroke to buy books," enjoyed other favours from sundry noble benefactors , and was purveyor of masques to the Court, intermittently popular playright in the public theatres, and pensioner to two kings, though he had begun as...