Courts without Kings? The Political Center in Provinces, Colonies, and Republics: Regional Conference Report

1 Courts withoutKings? ThePolitical Center in Provinces, Colonies, andRepublics A REGIONAL CONFERENCE REPORT by Malcolm Smuts kingless court may seem an oxymoron, since by the usual definition, a court is simply a monarch's residence. Yet manyfeatures normally associated with court societies have developed historically around provincial noblemen, colonial governors, and revolutionary leaders like Cromwell and Napoleon. Thefirst major conference ofThe North American Societyfor Court Studies, co-sponsored by the University ofMassachusetts at Boston and The Historical Society, set out to explore how the tools and insights developed by scholars ofEuropean courts might befruitfully applied to the study of provincial, colonial, and republican societies. The conference opened with four piprs examining the problem of whether courts existed in the provinces of major European monarchies. Kristen Neuschd described the material culture of I-rcnch noble households in the sixteenth Century , arguing that tt provided a means for cementing bonds of friendship and alliance between noblemen, through rituals of gift-giving and hospitality These rituals reflected .in assumption that all nobles were in some sense equal, since all belonged to a single noble order. In this respect, noble households differed from the royal court, whose material and ceremonial culture stressed hierarchical relations of service and dependence. 1 -iu icncc Bryant followed with an account of how French rituals of kingship changed under Louts XI in the late fifteenth century loins disliked formal ceremonies, since they constrained lus ability to define phtical relationships through assertions of his own will. But lus reluctance to follow traditional ceremonial scripts had the paradoxical result of opning opprtunities tor provincial cities to redefine the rituals used to welcome him during his frequent tours of his kingdom, so as to stress their own claims to local liberties rather than the supremacy of royal authority. Paprs by Timothy Ravlor and Catherine Wilkinson-Zerner examined great - .Vr noblemen in seventeenth-century England and Spin who combined service to the Crown with assertions of their own status as provincial magnates. R.ulor showed how the great northern landowner and royalist general, William Cavendish Duke of Newcastle, asserted his status as "a prince in the provinces" through the artistic decor of his country house and the use of print media. Zerner's illustrated talk focused on the town that Philip Ill's great favorite, the Duke of Derma, erected in his provincial power base and named after himself She compared it to the town of Richelieu, erected a few yvars later by the favorite of Louis XIII. as well as to several other Spanish towns dominated by noble castles. Historians haw often commented on the ways in which kings used urban architecture and city planning to express their grandeur through their capital cities. Zerner showed that great noblemen sometimes used provincial towns in very similar ways. These pprs underlined tlic essentially ambiguous nature of the relationship between kings and the great nobles and civic dignitaries who wielded power in their name. Although Lerma, Newcastle, and the provincial towns of late medieval France, all acknowledged the supremacy of the King, and indeed boasted of their loyalty to him, they also straw to assert their dignity and authority as provincial rulers in ways that implicitly limited royal authority I lie next sessions extended this analysis to the colonial empires of Spain and Britain. Luc Duerloo explained the dual significance of the court in Brussels. as a focal pint of Flemish noble society and secondary center of Habsburg power, used to launch diplomatic initiatives that the King of Spain could always disavow if necessary. When the prestige and influence of that court declined from the mid 1 620s, the Flemish elite became increasingly restiw, and finally revolted in 1632. Four paprs examined -14 the plitical and ceremonial apparatus surrounding Spanish viceroys in the New World. Alejandro Canequc discussed the opration of viceregal pitrouage in the politics of colonia] Mexico. Alejandra Osorio explored the use of "simulacra" or visual representations of the King of Spain in plitical rituals in Lima. Nancy Fee explained the local furor created by the decision of the Aragonese nobleman, Juan dc Palafox y Mendoza, to incorpirate the arms of his natiw kingdom, rather than those of Castile, in the great alter...