In 1603 the Stuarts inherited a throne that had stood for a generation as a bulwark against the ambitions of Spain and the Counter-Reformation. England’s international leadership of the Protestant cause was, to be sure, due largely to circumstances beyond her ruler’s control. Elizabeth did her best to keep out of the religious wars sweeping across the continent, knowing how ruinously expensive they were and how dangerous to all constituted authority. Given the chance, she would gladly have compromised with moderate Catholics on most doctrinal issues, disciplined puritans, and maintained cordial relations with the great European powers. But events forced...

To this point we have concentrated on forms of art, literature, and pageantry that reflected reactions to the Crown’s religious and foreign policies. Yet the cultural changes occurring within the court between the 1590s and the 1630s cannot be understood simply as a response to politics. Before pursuing our analysis into the period of Charles’s personal rule, we need to examine the complex transformation in the taste and outlook of the royal entourage that occurred during the preceding generation. The first step will be to reconstruct the environment in which that transformation took place.

To do this we need to...

The distinctive ambience of the royal court and the society orbiting around it did not escape the notice of contemporaries. The contrast between courtly sophistication and simple country manners was already a commonplace in our period. Some observers praised the elegance and refinement of life in the capital, compared with what Donne once called “the barbarousness and insipid dullness of the country.”¹ Thus Suckling bragged about Caroline London:

There you shall find the wit and wine,

Flowing alike and both divine,

Dishes with names not known in books,

And less amongst the college cooks,

With sauce so subtle that you...

The classical influences we have been tracing were one major stimulus to the development of early Stuart court culture. Another, of at least equal importance, was a growing admiration for continental painting and sculpture, which the English court first fully discovered in this period.¹ At the beginning of James’s reign England had assimilated less of the artistic culture of the Renaissance than virtually any kingdom in western Europe.² By the 1630s the situation was completely transformed: Van Dyck was among the two or three most fashionable portraitists in all Europe, and London’s art collections could rival those of any continental...

We have so far examined the artistic changes occurring at the Stuart court through a nuts-and-bolts study of administration and patronage. But those changes ultimately involved far more than the assembling of great collections and the recruitment and supervision of foreign artists. Court art and architecture were not just decorative embellishments; they also served to project the aura of prestige, power, and sanctity which clung to the king and his entourage. Caroline works often accomplished this purpose in profoundly different ways from those of Elizabeth’s reign. The contrast between a Van Dyck portrait and one by Gower or Peake, for...

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 Hilliard 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 Jacobean poets, playwrights, musicians, and art patrons gave way to...

It should now be evident that the relationship between the culture of the early Stuart court and the values underlying the Crown’s more controversial policies was almost never simple and straightforward. Charles did not try to render art and literature subservient to the needs of the state in the manner of modern totalitarian regimes and some continental monarchs of the seventeenth century. Indeed, the Crown never enforced ideological purity, even among those who formulated and executed royal policies. The court was not organized as a political party; it issued no manifestos, fought no elections, and did not purge itself of...

Side by side with the creed of divine-right monarchy there developed in the 1630s a secular cult of Charles and Henrietta Maria. Its central theme was the peace bestowed by the monarchs upon England, often symbolized by the halcyon, a mythical bird who builds her nest upon the ocean and possesses a magical power to calm the waves. As Albion’s Triumph, the king’s masque of 1631, proclaimed:

Arms are laid by: early and late

The traveller goes safe to bed:

Men eat and drink in massie plate

And are with dainties daily fed

Why should this isle above the rest...

Charles and Henrietta Maria last performed a masque celebrating the blessings of their halcyon reign in January 1640. By then the structure of prerogative government had already begun to crumble, lending a note of urgency to the allegorical triumph of royal love over factious humors acted out before the assembled court. Over the next two years the crisis deepened, until in the summer of 1642 the monarchs left their capital—the queen for the continent, the king to raise an army against the rebellious Parliament. In two civil wars he attempted to impose by force the vision of social harmony...