and commenting on the spectacle of statecraft in England. In these passages of his dispatches, Le Fèvre de la Boderie works to distinguish himself as an astute observer of political theater. After witnessing James I’s appearance at Parliament, for example, he concluded a detailed description of his clothes, the throne, and the setting by remarking: “The ceremony was in truth very beautiful and felt of its ancientness.”33 He signaled the close alliance between England and Denmark by detailing the feasts, fireworks, and other entertainments lavished on the Danish king during his visit to London in summer 1606, noting that the preparations served as “a testament to their good neighborliness and friendship.”34
Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s descriptions of events at court are nearly always accompanied by such conjectures about their hidden significance. As Hampton points out, many early modern diplomats styled their dispatches on the model of the relazione penned by Venetian ambassadors for the doge and senate. A relazione writer would highlight his skills “as a reader of signs, as an interpreter,” often by foregrounding his own expert gaze through extensive first-person narration.35 Venetian diplomats—or, more precisely, their professional secretaries who polished the ambassadors’ notes—practiced the form of the relazione as a finely honed craft.36 French ambassadors, by contrast, exhibited widely varying styles in their reports. For example, the volume of hand-copied letters from France’s ambassadors in Venice in the 1630s features an abrupt change in tone when du Houssay took over for the ailing De La Thuillerie in 1638, as the cool professionalism of the older diplomat gives way to panicked queries about protocol, flurries of postscripts, and complaints about the weather.37 Le Fèvre de la Boderie more closely sticks to the Venetian example. Compared to his colleagues from La Serenissima, though, he downplays the first person. The ambassador’s own point of view appears more frequently as an object of someone else’s action (“they tell me”) than as the subject of an independent action or observation.
The ambassador’s personal subjectivity becomes more prominent, however, in the passages devoted to court entertainments. In a December 20, 1607, letter outlining the preparations for a holiday dance, for example, he asserted his interpretation of particular casting choices in the first person: “I also take as a sign of their attempts to display less ill will toward the Catholics that the King, as he left for the hunt, asked the queen to prepare a ball for the Christmas festivities, and took personal responsibility for the expenses which, it is said, must be more than six or seven thousand écus (for they don’t know how to do anything for less here). They remark that almost all the ladies the queen has called to be in the ball are Catholics.”38 The ambassador foregrounds his subjectivity, performing his interpretation in the first person before authorizing his viewpoint with corroborating hearsay. He continues: “What assures me more is that this interpretation is given and publicized by the servants of their Majesties.”39 Mixing direct observation, analysis, and opinion gathered on the ground, the passage exemplifies the “dialectic of testimony and judgment” that, according to Andrea Frisch, characterized eyewitnessing at the turn of the sixteenth to seventeenth century.40 At a time when personal testimony was not automatically regarded as authoritative, first-person accounts gained credence through a rhetoric of “intersubjectivity” including cross-reference.41 Le Fèvre de la Boderie cites English informants to bolster and give context to his own judgments. At the same time, he establishes his bona fides as a credible witness, faithful interpreter, and good spy for the French king. The ambassador’s self-representation in the course of conveying intelligence constituted a kind of performance in writing through which he embellished his own image for the benefit of his masters back in France.
Dispatches recounting the ambassador’s participation as an invited guest at court entertainment heightened the stakes of self-portrayal. His presence and positioning in the dancing hall were an index of his monarch’s “dignity” in the eyes of the host, a sign of estimation displayed for all the other courtiers and diplomats to see. After the entertainment was over, the ambassador’s account of the entertainment represented a second opportunity for performance as he portrayed himself in retrospective narrative as the perfect embodiment of his master’s prestige. The ambassador’s performance-as-spectator had ramifications both for the international status of his state and for his own professional esteem.
The significance of the diplomat’s role as spectator of court performances comes into relief in the texts documenting the diplomatic uproar caused by the failure of the English court to invite Le Fèvre de la Boderie to a masque—Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Beauty—organized by Queen Anna in the Carnival season of 1608. As recounted by Le Fèvre de la Boderie in his correspondence, the incident began in early January 1608 when an ally at the English court, the Duke of Lennox,42 warned him that the queen had invited the Spanish ambassador but not him to attend a performance of her new masque.43 This information was shocking because, at least since 1603, it had been customary at the English court to “feast” all the resident and extraordinary ambassadors during the Christmas and Carnival season, including inviting them to select performances of masques or revels.44 The news infuriated the French because through her choice of guests Queen Anna displayed a preference for Spain. The London masque hall had become another stage on which the fight for international precedence between the two countries could be played out.45
The consequences of the invitation affair unfolded over a yearlong period and took a toll on the morale and energy of its participants. Venetian ambassador Marc’ Antonio Correr reported in a February 20, 1609, dispatch that Queen Anna “says she is resolved to trouble herself no more with Masques.”46 Le Fèvre de la Boderie, for his part, was recalled to France soon after his attendance at the Masque of Queens.47 Viewed in the light of its prolonged effects, Anna’s action in excluding the French ambassador from The Masque of Beauty could be characterized as a “diplomatic incident.” Historian Lucien Bély usefully defines the diplomatic incident as an event that breaches the usually impenetrable barrier between diplomacy’s external ceremony and the secret play of diplomatic relationships and strategies,48 revealing the “underground tensions” that invisibly structure the day-to-day culture of diplomacy.49 This is certainly true of the incident surrounding Le Fèvre de la Boderie and the queen’s masques. In disrupting the normal diplomatic protocol and etiquette around entertainments at the English court (in which ambassadors were traditionally included on a routine basis), the event produced a spate of texts in which ambassadors, secretaries, and monarchs were forced to articulate the significance of court entertainment in relation to issues of prestige, visibility, and political reciprocity. The correspondence exposes a virtual space of preparation and planning that Goffman designates the “back region or backstage” of social performance: the space in which “illusions and impressions are openly constructed” and thus “the impression fostered by the performance is knowingly contradicted as a matter of course.”50 In this way, the incident and its aftermath disclosed the masque’s role in maintaining, representing, and publicizing international relationships.
Diplomatic correspondence relating to the invitation incident provides one source of insight into the importance of the masque as an arena for performing political relations. In his letters to Villeroy and Puisieux, Le Fèvre de la Boderie becomes both lead actor in and author of the drama he describes. He uses the first person liberally, focalizing events through his own limited perspective. Yet he also incorporates multiple perspectives through a dramatic narrativization of his encounters with various players in the incident. For example, the ambassador portrays himself first learning about the invitations from his friend and informant the Duke of Lennox, who relays the information by recounting a conversation between Anna and James: “The King remained somewhat astonished and responded to her only: but what will the French ambassador say about the Spanish ambassador being there while the French one is not?”51 Through the mouthpiece of Lennox, Le Fèvre de la Boderie attributed the diplomatic scandal to a domestic dispute between the king and queen. The irrational, hispanophilic queen caused the problem; the king supported the French. In the ambassador’s telling, this version gained credence a few days later, when the king proposed a private dinner and entertainment for
