Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England

7. CHARLES I AND THE CONSOLIDATION OF A COURT CULTURE

7 CHARLES I AND THE CONSOLIDATION OF A COURT CULTURE The reign of James I witnessed a series of fundamental innovations in the art, literature, and music of the royal court, but even in the early 1620S these experiments had not entirely supplanted the court culture of the late sixteenth century. Prodigy house architecture, neo ..chivalric pageantry and verse, and costume portraiture in the tradition of Hil .. liard survived side by side with newer forms, creating a cultural mosaic of bewildering diversity. About the time of Charles's accession a more cohesive and unified court culture began to emerge. The restless experimentation of [aco .. bean poets, playwrights, musicians, and art patrons gave way to efforts at refining forms that had already developed by the early 1620S. Jones continued to work in the mature classical style he had first perfected in the Whitehall Banqueting House. Gentileschi and Van Dyck settled in England, bringing to fruition the cosmopolitan artistic culture that had begun to develop in the time of Prince Henry. Court poets like Carew, Suckling, and Lovelace assimilated the styles of Jonson and Donne, while Shirley, Brome, and Davenant built upon the satiric tradition of the private theaters.' Taste also became more uniform as the newer, classical and Baroque values finally supplanted older Elizabethan fash.. ions. A transitional period was succeeded by a time of consolidation and synthesis. Two things chiefly account for this. First, after 1625 the extensive 184 FOR MAT ION 0 FAN Ewe 0 U R T C U L T U R E patronage and pronounced tastes of the royal couple and a few other great courtiers lent greater unity to the entire culture of fashionable London. Although Charles and his immediate entourage never paid most of the costs of the capital's cultural amenities, they did provide a crucial source of leadership. Even in the 1630Sthe theatrical companies retained considerable independence, and not all poets looked to the court for patronage. Nevertheless, the Caroline court was much more of an arbiter of taste than its Jacobean predecessor. 2 Second, a much younger group of patrons, artists, poets, and musi.. cians emerged in the 1620Sand 1630S,accustomed since adolescence to the stylistic techniques and cultural values developing during the early seventeenth century. Having grown up as James reestablished England's ties with Spain and Italy, knowing the art of Titian and Rubens, the drama of Shakespeare and Jonson, and the poetry ofJonson and Donne, they felt at home in the sophisticated atmosphere of the Stuart capital as neither their elders nor their provincial contemporaries could. The significance of this generational change has been obscured by the convention of distinguishing sharply between the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods while treating the reigns of the first two Stuarts more or less as a unit. 3 Yet in many ways 1625 was a more decisive cultural watershed than 1603. True, the years around the tum of the century witnessed more radical experiments in poetry and drama than the 1620S, but to a remarkable extent these were the work of men born in the 1560s and early 1570s, who had already reached maturity before Elizabeth's death." Bacon, Shakespeare, and Marlowe were less than a decade older than Jonson, Donne, and even Inigo Jones, who was al.. ready twenty ..eight at James's accession. It takes some effort to realize that George Chapman, who competed with Jonson as a dramatist for the Jacobean private playhouses and lived until 1631, was older than Marlowe and almost contemporary with Sir Philip Sidney. Charles came to the throne just as this older generation was disap.. pearing. Shakespeare died in 1616, to be followed two years later by Raleigh and Francis Beaumont, and before 1632 by Bacon, Fletcher, Webster, Donne, Campion, and Drayton. Jonson lived on until 1637, and Jones lived into the 1650s, but they now found themselves sur.. rounded by colleagues and patrons twenty or thirty years their junior. At the time of his accession Charles was twenty ..five, Buckingham was thirty ..two, and Henrietta Maria was only sixteen. With few exceptions they recruited talents as young as themselves. Herrick and Carew were CharlesI andCourt Culture 185 born in the early 1590S; Van Dyck, Waller, Davenant, and Suckling were born in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Lovelace was born in 1618. These younger patrons, poets, and artists assimilated the experiments of the previous few decades, along with important French, Spanish...