is the background against which we must set court/country rivalries in the early seventeenth century. Under Elizabeth, the danger from Spain and from the Pope, and perhaps from the English lower classes, had forced unity on the ruling class. Every man, as Fulke Greville put it, believed that ‘his private fish-ponds could not be safe whilst the public state of the kingdom stood in danger of present or expectant extremities’.1 But after the defeat of the Armada in 1588, political attitudes, especially attitudes to foreign affairs, began to diverge. Gradually what had been healthy tensions between different groupings on Elizabeth’s Privy Council became ruthless faction feuds. Ultimately two sides lined up to fight a civil war. A deep breach opened up between the early Stuart court and the main body of respectable opinion in the country. In so far as this opinion was expressed in any organized way, ‘Puritanism’ in a very wide and loose definition of that over-worked word can serve to describe it. But the roots of hostility to the court were not merely theological but political, moral and cultural as well.
The divergences showed up more clearly under James I. Neither Elizabeth’s own behaviour nor the conduct of her courtiers had always been impeccable. Yet certain standards of decorum had been maintained, not least because of the prudent parsimony of the Virgin Queen. But there were many things about James I which shocked country squires and London merchants – the drunken orgies which marked the visit of the King of Denmark in 1606 for instance. James’s public fondling and slobbering over his male favourites might have been forgiven, but not the fact that he allowed them to influence policy. This was utterly foreign to the Elizabethan tradition. When the Earl of Somerset, a Scottish favourite, wanted the Earl of Essex’s wife, James egged on a bevy of bishops to declare the marriage annulled on the grounds of Essex’s impotence and his Countess’s intact virginity. Some were prepared to believe the former, none the latter. When civil war came, Essex was Lord General of the Parliamentary army.
An even greater scandal broke in 1615, when Somerset and his new Countess were convicted of poisoning Sir Thomas Overbury because he knew too much about their affairs. The only way in which the anti-Spanish party at court could think of ending James’s subservience to the Spanish Ambassador was by getting the Archbishop of Canterbury to introduce him to a new boy-friend. The ruse was successful; but as the new minion was the future Duke of Buckingham, the remedy proved worse than the disease. There were scandals of a more conventional sort: two Lord Treasurers and a Lord Chancellor were convicted of taking bribes. With more money about, corruption either increased or was believed to have increased. The price of a peerage, of a baronetcy, and of most court offices was publicly known. Sir Simonds D’Ewes, writing in cipher for his own eye only, accused James of ‘the sin of sodomy’, and added ‘all his actions did tend to an absolute monarchy.’1
Lucy Hutchinson sums up the Puritan view, though she has her own heightened and telling way of putting things. ‘The court of this king [James I] was a nursery of lust and intemperance. … The generality of the gentry of the land soon learnt the court fashion, and every great house in the country became a stew of uncleanness.’ When James died, ‘the face of the court’, Mrs. Hutchinson admits, ‘was much changed … for King Charles was temperate and chaste and serious.’2 Gross errors of taste and probity were eliminated. Charles was a better judge of men than his father, and his personal fastidiousness offered a more acceptable public image. But the charge of lack of Protestant patriotism ultimately proved fatal. Charles was too devoted to his French wife, too dependent on unpopular bishops. Nor did it do the Church of England any good that the Bishop of Waterford and Lismore had the misfortune to be convicted of whoredom and sodomy in the autumn of 1640.1
The growing court/country rivalries came to include attitudes towards patronage of the arts. Under Elizabeth, the Earl of Leicester, the first great English art-collector, led the party which favoured an active pro-Protestant foreign policy. Leicester’s nephew, Sir Philip Sidney, was a leader of international Protestantism as well as a great English literary figure. The mantle of Leicester and Sidney fell upon the Russells, Earls of Bedford and upon Shakespeare’s Earl of Southampton, but especially upon the Herberts, Earls of Pembroke. The wife of the second Earl was Sidney’s sister: the fourth Earl was christened Philip after Sidney. The third Earl of Pembroke and the Earl of Arundel were brothers-in-law; but in 1616 Arundel was described as ‘head of the Catholics’ and Pembroke as ‘head of the Puritans’; Southampton was ‘head of the malcontents’.2 Arundel and the fourth Earl of Pembroke were to be on opposite sides in the Civil War.
In literature we can trace a line of descent from Spenser (patronized by Leicester) through a group of poets patronized by Southampton, Bedford and Pembroke, ranging from Shakespeare, Drayton, the two Fletchers, William Browne and Samuel Daniel to George Wither. While drama was decaying under court influence, the third Earl of Pembroke encouraged Thomas Middleton’s attempt to produce an opposition drama in the anti-Spanish A Game at Chess.3 George Herbert, Pembroke’s kinsman and protégé, withdrew from court to write his great poetry in a country parsonage. In such an atmosphere ‘no free and splendid wit can flourish’, Milton was soon to say. For the concomitant of Charles I’s patronage of the arts was a savage censorship which, in George Wither’s words, brought ‘authors, yea, the whole commonwealth and all the liberal sciences into bondage’.4
The court culture, like court religion, came to be isolated from the mass of the population, and – a new feature – from many of the propertied class. The censorship and government pressures prevented many of the intelligentsia from expressing their point of view, or frightened them out of doing so. Art, like everything else at Charles’s court, was smeared with the trail of finance. The King’s most ambitious projects were paid for by abuses which contributed to bring about the Civil War. Thus the unrealized plan for reconstructing Whitehall as a single great palace, comparable with the Escorial or the Louvre, was a magnificent design which ‘reflects clearly enough the absolutist ideals of the King’. But it was also a megalomaniac idea. As Sir John Summerson says, it ‘would have been a grave and fitting backcloth for the bloodier revolution which it would most certainly have helped to precipitate’. There was ‘a close association between the arts of the court and those elements in Stuart policy which precipitated the constitutional upheavals of the seventeenth century.’1
As the narrow ruling circle became more and more isolated from public opinion, so it needed the flattery of artists and poets to buttress its morale. How different things had been under Elizabeth! When the monarchy was really popular, it did not need to be so repeatedly reassured that it enjoyed divine approval. All the masques allegorizing peace and concord imposed by royal authority, the apotheoses and descending goddesses, betray a deep insecurity and longing for help from outside.
There was then an abnormal cultural situation in the England in which Milton reached maturity. P. W. Thomas speaks of ‘two warring cultures’. With ‘the growing isolation, exclusiveness and repression of the Court’ he contrasts the earlier ‘literature that had been the authentic voice of patriotic high seriousness and protestant nationalism’. The Caroline court, ‘however refined, seemed to speak for narrow snobbery and effete indulgence’. ‘Royal patronage had failed to sustain … a culture … of unequivocal moral and intellectual vigour. It mistook … a governing clique for the nation. … It managed to create a mythology of itself that was deeply divisive.’ This was seen by the Puritan opposition as ‘the pollution of the high seriousness and moral earnestness of the mainstream of English humanism’. Ben Jonson represents the last attempt to infuse moral commitment into court art; and he was first absorbed into the court and then ultimately squeezed out. Milton was aware of ‘a decadent Court, its art an index to a deep malaise’. Thomas rejects the view which sees Cavalier humanism as ‘life-affirming’, by contrast with Puritan prudery. We shall find ample reason, at least so far as Milton is concerned, to confirm his opinion that ‘far from suppressing the sensual and sentimental element in sexual relationships, English Puritanism exposed it to the full force of its habit of scrupulous analysis.’2 As the unity of Elizabeth’s reign slowly dissolved, the Laudian innovations isolated bishops from the mass of the population. One may
