256 Book Reviews

Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England, R. Malcolm Smuts ~Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 292 pp., cloth, $34.95 and E29.70 and Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I, Kevin Sharpe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 301 pp., cloth, $49.50 and f27.50.

It is rare for two books of outstanding quality on a given subject to appear in a single year. It is rarer still for each to reach seemingly contradictory conclusions concerning their chosen topics, yet remain a vital contribution to historiography. Yet this is the situation created by the publication of R. Malcolm Smuts’ Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition and Kevin Sharpe’s Criticism and Compliment. And it is a tribute to the intellect and scholarship behind each that neither work suffers detraction by comparison with the other.

For Smuts, his chosen task is to identify and trace the developments in artistic activity and patronage which would lead to the distinctive culture of the court of Charles I during the Personal Rule. From the diffuse ‘courtly’ milieu of the Elizabethan period, in which the central cult of Eliza/Astraea the Virgin Queen, was in fact more the product of noble and urban artistic patronage than of central direction, Smuts describes a gradual concentration of elite culture upon the court and the rapidly burgeoning metropolis. Similarly, as the geographical range of the ‘court circle’ contracted, as royal progresses deciined and the social elite migrated towards the Capital for ‘the season’, so artistic fashions became more elitist. The flamboyant clothes of the aristocracy and their ostentatious prodigy houses gave way to the more somber classical styles espoused by the Earl of Arundel and immortalised in the verse of Ben Jonson and the architecture of Inigo Jones. Under Charles I this movement was consolidated under enthusiastic royal patronage, and the aristocracy and court began to conceive of themselves as ‘a caste set apart by its intellectual distinction, spiritual refinement and instinctive elegance’. The corollary of this elitism, made visible in the aloof, condescending, grandees portrayed on canvas by Van Dyck, was a measure of isolation from the rest of the realm. Such art ‘appealed chiefly to small groups of intellectuals, most of whom resided for at least part of the year in London. The best art and literature ofthe court no longer served as a vehicle for ideas and attitudes that tended to unify the nation’.

It is precisely this notion of cultural isolation, specifically the idea of a bi-polar divide between ‘court’ and ‘country’, which Sharpe seeks to criticise in his study. Ever since the pioneering work of Perez Zagorin and Laurence Stone,’ the concept of a ‘cour~country divide’ has dominated Caroline historiography. In this model the sycophantic courtiers of Charles I were so busy fashioning their own artistic tributes to the incipient ‘absolutism’ of the monarch that they hardly noticed the rising tide of opposition in the world beyond the court until it was too late. Thus the English Civil War was in great part a clash ofinimical cultures: the one robust, socially-aware and fundamentally puritan, the other fawning, over-sophisticated, corrupt and crypto-catholic. In a powerful introductory chapter Sharpe explodes this false divide, and he goes on in what follows todemonstrate that even the most ‘courtly’ of writers, such as Thomas Carew and Sir William Davenant, were far from the uncritical sycophants of tradition. Indeed that archtypal courtly form the masque was itself employed by them to voice criticism of royal policies and attitudes and to suggest alternative political and cultural strategies.

Sharpe’s arguments are advanced with both vigour and considerable rhetorical strength, as befits an author schooied in the harsh world of early Stuart historiography, but for al1 the persuasiveness of his case for a healthy, responsive, heterodox court culture, it remains difficult to accept that everything in the Stuart garden was lovely. He cannot

Book Reviews 257

entirely dismiss the counter-case which Smuts presents. AS the latter suggests, quoting Anthony Fletcher,

No one who knows the puritan world of lectures, fasts and exercises and who has also raised their eyes to Rubens’ apotheosis of Stuart monarchy on the ceiling of Inigo Jones’ Banqueting House in Whitehall can possibly doubt that there was a clash of cultures in the 1630s.

Where Sharpe is surely correct is in pointing out that this clash cannot be characterised as a simple divide between two rival positions denotable as ‘court and ‘country’. As both he and Smuts demonstrate, the Caroline court (or courts, for the household of Queen Henrietta Maria provided a second crucial centre of activity) was a complex entity. It contained both puritan and crypto-catholic, pro- and anti-Habsburg elements, and most shades of political and religious opinion inbetween. Thus many of the crucial debates over politics went on within the court (in a decade without parliaments they had no other forum) and were reflected in the poetry and drama which it patronised. The important divides in society were vertical, not horizontal, and were felt at court as much as elsewhere.

If Smuts and Sharpe differ over the extent of the relative isolation of the Caroline court, however, their studies also provide insights which add considerably to our understanding of that institution. Each work has its distinctive strengths. Smuts’ account is admirable in its breadth and its capacity to synthesise research across the disciplines of political history, literary criticism, art and architectural history. It also offers brief but stimulating close readings of key cultural texts, most notably Van Dyck’s magnificent Charles la la Ciusse and the Whitehall Banqueting House. Sharpe’s work, although more restricted in its range, concentrating predominantly on the poetry and drama of the successors to Jonson as the author of court masques, is consequently freer to scrutinise closely the texts concerned. In so doing he demonstrates how Davenant, Carew and Towshend invested their treatment of conventional poetic subjects, Nature, Love and Marriage, withspecific political significance. At times, particularly in the chapter on Carew, he is too ready to take the works considered as a unity, which articulate a coherent authorial position on a given subject over a rangae of texts, rather than as separate pieces reflecting differing perspectives, circumstances or even authorial personae. But this should not detract from the overall achievement which his work represents. By opening up these literary texts to close historical scrutiny, Sharpe beats a path for other Stuart historians to follow. Similarly, Smuts, in providing perhaps the first really comprehensive cultural history of the Stuart court, sets a standard against which future accounts will be judged. Stuart scholarship is the richer for both works.

Southampton University Greg Walker*

NOTES

*Greg Walker is British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Humanities at Southampton University.

1. P. Zagorin, ‘The Court and the Country: a note on Political Terminology in the Earlier Seventeenth Century’, English Historical Review, 77 (1962), 306- 11; and The Court and the Country (London, 1969); L. Stone, 77re Cuuses of the English Revolution (London, 1972).

2. A. Fletcher, 2’7re Outbreak of the English Civil War (London, 1981), p. 407.