The Politics of Desire: George Villiers, James I and courtly entertainment
Not strictly Tudor but I hope of interest regardless. An academic essay I wrote on the role of George Villiers’ in masques and plays at the court of King James I of England. Hope you enjoy!
‘All the way hither I entertained myself your unworthy servant with this dispute, whether you loved me now… better than at the time which I shall never forget at Farnham, where the bed’s head could not be found between the master and his dog’. This undated letter, written by George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham and addressed to his king, James Stuart, strongly implies a sexual relationship between the two men. Buckingham reminds James of this special encounter that occurred between them at Farnham Castle, where their bodies were so immeshed that there was no space left between them. In a later letter, this time written from James to Buckingham, the king concludes that he has nothing more to say except ‘that I wear Steenie’s picture in a blue ribbon under my waistcoat next to my heart… grant that ye may ever be a comfort to your dear dad and husband’. Steenie was James’ pet name for Buckingham, derived from St Stephen who reportedly had the face of an angel. These extracts from letters passed between these powerful Jacobean men paint graphic pictures of the physical body. Moreover, James’ reference to his favourite as his ‘husband’ teems with homoerotic desire.
This study will argue that George Villiers capitalised on his physical and emotional intimacy with King James in a number of ways. Early in his courtly career, Villiers used his physical charm to gain power and influence with the king. Having established himself as James’ undisputed favourite, Villiers continued using this successful trope as a means of maintaining his power and of expressing it to his potential rivals at court. The ultimate manifestation of physical expression at court would have been in the court masque, two of which, Ben Jonson’s The Golden Age Restored and The Gypsies Metamorphosed, shall be analysed in relation to Villiers’ expression of power. It is natural, therefore, that this study will focus not only on the literary content of these masques but also on the physical actions that Villiers performed. Villiers’ performances in these masques can impart much about the status of the minister-favourite at court, the influence and power such a person could wield as well as the complex and at times toxic mix of politics and physical display. Such displays of physical intimacy proved vital expressions of patronage bonds that abounded between the king and his favourite in a largely homosocial court. Court entertainments, when analysed through the lens of the relationship between the king and the Duke of Buckingham, can be seen as rooted in expressions of homoerotic desire staged in a proposal for the attainment and sustainment of political power.
George Villiers’ beginnings hardly anticipated his incredible rise to fortune and favouritism. The younger son of a knight, it wasn’t until his mother’s advantageous third marriage that he benefited from a polishing of manners and grace in the French court. On his return, Villiers was posited in King James I of England’s way to attract his attentions. In August 1614 James first set eyes on Villiers at Apethorpe. Villiers made a dazzling impression on the king who was known to be easily susceptible to the charms of beautiful young men. By all accounts, George Villiers’ handsomeness was striking. Having seen George in Spain, John Hacket remarked ‘from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head, there was no blemish in him’. Sir John Oglander described him as ‘one of the handsomest men in the whole world’. Villiers’ sunny personality, coupled with his exceptional good looks, enchanted and revitalised the king. Villiers’ physicality is known to have been one of his greatest assets. There are plentiful contemporary reports of his beauty and grace. It is imperative to note the significance of the physical nature of James and Villiers’ relationship, as Villiers would use his body as an effective means of not only attracting and pleasing the king, but also increasing his own political influence.
Having successfully charmed the king, George Villiers realised his next task was to establish himself as the king’s unrivalled favourite at court. To achieve this end, he used the means of courtly entertainment, namely the Jacobean court masque. Through the combined talents of the designer Inigo Jones and the poet laureate Ben Jonson, the Jacobean masque melded together the art forms of spoken drama, song and dance against the backdrop of elaborate scenery that created a platform for royal praise and political comment. However, it was the innovative introduction by Jonson of the antimasque that would become the staple of the genre. The antimasque portrayed wicked, demonic, impure characters on stage who thrived on anarchy. The final transition from antimasque to the main masque provided the noble masquers the opportunity to restore order. Ben Jonson provided young Villiers with the perfect opportunity to display his copious talents in front of the king in his masque The Golden Age Restored performed on New Year’s Day 1616.
The masque begins with the entry of the Greek goddess of wisdom, Pallas Athena, who announces to the ‘seated’ courtiers the will of Jove to ‘settle Astraea [goddess of justice] in her seat again’ in place of the Iron Age. Athena imparts that Jove intends to ‘let down in his golden chain/The Age of better metal’, that is, the Golden Age. Shortly after this point, ‘[a tumult, and clashing of arms heard within]’ disrupts Athena’s speech, who fears the ‘noise’ and ‘strife’ is the sound of the ‘Iron Age…up in arms!’. The personification of the Iron Age calls forth the Evils, physical representations of vices of the Iron Age: ‘Ambition, Pride, and Scorn, Force, Rapine, and thy babe last born, Smooth Treachery’.
The vices’ dominance does not last long, as Athena re-appears ‘shewing her shield’ and the vices ‘perish’ into ‘stone/And that be seen awhile, and then be none!’. Having successfully defeated the vices by turning them into stone, Athena calls forth Astraea and the Golden Age; ‘descend, you long, long wish’d and wanted pair… So shake all clouds off with your golden hair’. George Villiers was among the troupe of noble masquers who represented the Golden Age. Pallas Athena ‘throws a lightening from her shield…to which let all that doubtful darkness yield’ while Villiers, as the Golden Age, replied ‘And Love…Joys…All, all increase’. This dialogue was followed by ‘the first dance’. The dance celebrated the goddess of justice’s nourishment of James’ realm and dynasty. Villiers, dancing in front of the assembled courtiers, acted as the elegant personification of James’ reign recovered to justice and glory.
The dance sequence sheds light on Villiers’ personal powers. As Christiane Hille observes, ‘by submitting himself to the choreography of Jonson’s masque, Villiers fashioned his body as the living emblem of James’ returning Golden Age’. Villiers’ participation in this masque serves as an early example of the fascinating, handsome young man making a political comment on James’ reign, a flattering one at that, through the physical exhibition of bodily strength and grace. Villiers married flashes of male eroticism to Jonson’s political panegyric. Jonson’s script when coupled with Villiers’ aesthetic proved a winning combination, since a delighted James scheduled a second performance just five days later.
The context in which The Golden Age Restored was performed adds a greater impetus and motivation behind Villiers’ participation in the entertainment. George was not the king’s first favourite. His predecessor, Robert Carr, was a star on the wane when the king first laid eyes on Villiers. By the time The Golden Age Restored was performed, Carr’s days were increasingly numbered. Carr’s marriage to Lady Frances Howard was not looked kindly upon by his friend Thomas Overbury, who feared the union would drive a wedge between himself and the king’s favourite. When Overbury was found poisoned, by late 1615 suspicion had fell on Carr and his new wife.
In The Golden Age Restored, George Villiers proved victorious in an allegoric defeat of corrupt vices by reinstating courtly justice and splendour with the brilliance of his dancing. It seems more than a coincidence that this masque was staged under the cloud of the increasingly notorious Overbury murder, a case in which elite corruption, jealousy, lust and vice had manifested itself in a brutal killing. As Robert Carr was disgraced, the star of George Villiers was on the rise, bursting onto the court scene by employing the aesthetics of his physicality. Hille writes how dancing in masques ‘linked the dynamics of sexual potency to…political power, thereby asserting the legibility of the dancing male body as an object of erotic display’. Whilst this explains how the eroticism of Villiers’ performance was accepted in the court, we can assume from the private correspondence between the king and Villiers that James enjoyed the performance as a display of eroticism, thus adding an element of homoeroticism to Villiers’ dancing. George Villiers was utilising his physical prowess by presenting himself as sexually available. Such a display of homoerotic desire endowed Villiers the power of his ‘body politic’.
Although in early seventeenth-century England homosexual acts were forbidden and condemnable by law, there is evidence to suggest that such behaviour was tolerated to a certain degree. Eve Sedgwick argues that patriarchal societies perhaps even encouraged homosocial relationships: ‘in any male-dominated society, there is a special relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) bonds and the institution for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power over women: a relationship founded on an inherent and potentially active structural congruence’. Bruce Smith similarly observes that we can understand Jacobean male experienced better ‘if we recognise a potential for erotic feeling in male relationships of all kinds’.
The homosocial nature of James’ court, when considered alongside the fact of James’ liking for good-looking young men, makes the success of Villiers’ flamboyant performance in The Golden Age Restored seem less surprising. Taking into account the mighty fall from grace that Carr was suffering, Villiers’ appearance in the masque also seems like a cynical bid to fill the vacancy of James’ favourite. Villiers was presenting his body in close proximity to the king and thus expressed his position within the court. It was an audacious move that proved incredibly successful. James showered Villiers with titles and delighted in his company. The favourite’s intimacy with the king and his closeness to the sovereign’s body affirmed his special and exclusive power. Such displays of the body, as in Jonson’s masque, served as expressions of that power. The closeness between Villiers, who would become the Marquess and eventually the Duke of Buckingham, and his king manifested itself at Farnham where, as the opening of this study suggests, Buckingham surrendered to James’ sexual advances. The same opinion is shared by Buckingham’s principle biographer, Roger Lockyer: ‘Buckingham himself provides the evidence that at Farnham he at last gave in to the king’s importunity’.
For the following few years Buckingham affirmed his position as James’ minister-favourite. His unique power lay in his physical intimacy with the king. He was created the Master of the Horse, a senior household position that allowed Buckingham to help James mount and dismount his horse. As such, Buckingham was the only person in the England officially allowed to touch the king. J.H. Elliott confirms the idea that intimacy was the prerogative of the minister-favourite, since ‘the key to the power of the royal favourite was… that he had unique access to the monarch’. Buckingham’s position as James’ favourite was confirmed in an emphatic speech James delivered to the Privy Council in 1617: ‘I, James, am neither a god nor an angel, but a man like any other. Therefore I act like a man, and confess to loving those dear to me more than other men. You may be sure that I love the Earl of Buckingham more than anyone else… I wish to speak in my own behalf, and not to have it thought to be a defect, for Jesus Christ did the same, and therefore I cannot be blamed. Christ had his John and I have my George’. James defends his favouritism through Jesus Christ’s affection for John, and he makes no bones about his recognition of Buckingham’s personal charms and qualities. Buckingham’s physical intimacy with the king, as was evident in The Golden Age Restored, found expression in courtly entertainments. Buckingham’s confidence in his intimacy with the king, and in his position as James’ minister-favourite, manifested itself in another masque that Buckingham himself commissioned some years later; The Gypsies Metamorphosed.
Jonson’s longest and most unusual masque was first staged in August 1621 at Buckingham’s recently renovated old house on the hill in Burley. The masque was performed in multiple settings and reworked for each one. It should be said that for this study, the original version performed at Buckingham’s house at Burley shall be used in analysis, so as to understand the message Buckingham and Jonson’s originally wanted to convey and to avoid confusion. Buckingham and his wife, Katherine, hosted a lavish housewarming at which the king was the guest of honour. On James’ entrance into Buckingham’s house, he was praised in a pre-prepared speech as part of the masque: ‘Welcome, O welcome, then, and enter here/The house your bounty ‘ath built, nd still doth rear/With those high favours, and those heaped increases…The master is your creature’. The speech recognises the favouritism Buckingham enjoys, and affirms Buckingham as James’ humble ‘creature’. Once the action of the masque began, the assembled guests were no doubt surprised at the uncharacteristic lack of elaborate scenery in the masque. Bafflement and shock most likely followed when Buckingham revealed himself, alongside some of his family members, dressed as gypsies, ‘dressed in tawny makeup and artfully tattered rags’. The masque’s plot is simple: a group of gypsies, led by Buckingham in the role of the Gypsy Captain, jest about the mischief they get up to, read the palms of audience members, pick pockets, dance, sing and eventually reveal themselves as Buckingham and his close male friends and relations.
The masque was unique from other courtly masques in a variety of ways. Firstly, it was highly unusual for non-professional actors to take on speaking parts. Buckingham himself played the part of the Captain of the Gypsies, with his brother-in-law John Fielding and the poet Endymion Porter as the other gypsies in the band. Buckingham thus made himself an even more potent figure on stage, having the capacity to sing, dance and speak in the same masque. After the initial speech from the Jackman, a large speaking part played by a professional actor, a ‘dance’ commences, ‘which is the entrance of the Captain [Buckingham] with six more to a stand’. Buckingham enters showing off his dancing ability, his most renowned skill. Buckingham wisely makes more of the dancing, as the Captain encourages his fellow gypsies to ‘dance another strain’.
Buckingham’s use of his physicality in this masque extended beyond the exhibition of his dancing to an intimate moment between himself and the king, integrated as part of the masque. In a fascinating moment, Buckingham, dressed as the Gypsy Captain, approaches James, and after some dialogue notices ‘a gentleman’s [James’] hand’. The Captain takes the king’s hand, and declares ‘I’ll kiss it for luck’s sake; you should by this line/Love a horse and a hound, but no part of a swine’. Buckingham kisses James’ hand in front the guests and exposes personal, intimate details about the king, specifically his fondness of hunting and his dislike of pork. Continuing to read James’ fortune, the Captain proclaims he is ‘no great wencher’. Buckingham had the confidence in James’ love and sense of humour that he could go as far as to publicly allude to James’ attachment to the company of men as opposed to women. The kissing of the hand, the expression of personal details and the comic allusions to James’ sexuality belie a homoeroticism in Buckingham’s performance that is expressed through the physical action of Buckingham taking the king’s hand and pretending to read his fortune. When the Captain realises the man whose fortune he has been reading is the king, he is unabashed in his flattery of him: ‘But stay!… what’s here? A king? A monarch? What wonders appear!…A master of men’. The sequence is a masterful expression of Buckingham’s physical intimacy with the king, as well as his daring confidence in James’ favour of him.
Jonson’s dialogue allows further exploitation of James’ famously low-brow sense of humour. The character Patrico recounts a ‘flagonfekian/A Devil’s-Arse-a-Peakin/Born first at Nigglington…Boarded at Tappington/Bedded at Wappington’. A flagonfekian was a term for a flagon-beater, related to slang for ‘feak’, meaning whip. The words niggling and wapping were slang for having sex whilst tapping was a term for ‘opening the taps of liquor casks’. With sexual innuendos already abounding in this scene, Jonson goes further by implying that ‘Cock Lorel [a legendary underworld figure]’ enters the ‘Devil’s Arse’. There is no direct evidence to suggest that the sexual humour in the masque is related to the relationship between James and Buckingham. The high probability of a sexual relationship between the king and his favourite would suggest, however, that the homoerotic, phallic humour was included in the masque for James’ enjoyment. It also points to an incredible intimacy that existed between James and Buckingham. Although Buckingham was not physically delivering the dialogue in this scene or performing in any bodily sense, the overtly physical, sexual nature of the jokes would have spoken to James directly and ensured his mind was not far from Buckingham’s famous beauty. The audacity of the jokes in a masque commissioned by Buckingham for James’ enjoyment nod to Buckingham’s supreme confidence in his position as James’ lover and firm favourite. Buckingham’s exploitation of his intimacy with the king, whether it be kissing the king’s hand, dancing for him or commissioning explicitly homoerotic dialogue to be spoken for his pleasure, reveal his expression of homoerotic desire on stage to sustain his power the king has endowed him with. The strategy was, again, a success. James obviously comprehended the love that was conveyed in the witty masque. James even wrote a poem inspired by the entertainment at Burley: ‘This goodly house it smiles, and all this store/Of huge provisions smiles upon us here’.
Another masterstroke in The Gypsies Metamorphosed was the affirmation of Buckingham as part of James’ family. As the letters in which James calls himself Buckingham’s ‘dad’ have demonstrated, in many ways Buckingham and his relatives were the adoptive family of the king. Buckingham and his male relatives performed as the gypsy band in the masque, and in the fortune telling scene the gypsies also tell the fortunes of Buckingham’s wife, his mother and his sister-in-law. The Fourth Gypsy (possibly played by Buckingham’s older brother, John Villiers, Viscount Purbeck) approaches Buckingham’s mother, the Countess of Buckingham and proclaims her the Queen of the Gypsies: ‘two of your sons are gypsies too/You shall our queen be’. This moment hints that Villiers’ mother was a kind of royalty herself. The Fourth Gypsy goes on to recognise the jealousies that such favour of the Villiers’ might manifest at court; ‘and see who/importunes/the hurt of either yours or you/And doth not wish both George and Sue/And every bairn besides, all new/Good fortunes’. ‘George and Sue’ reference Buckingham and his sister. The Fourth Gypsy recognises that some are bitter about the Villiers’ family influence and wish them anything but ‘good fortune’. The emphasis on the Villiers family as a tight-knit, exclusive unit, with the implication of the king himself being a member, provides further evidence of Buckingham using his intimacy with the king as a means of expressing the power that intimacy affords him.
The artistic choices behind the gypsy theme are intriguing. Much attention has been paid to the political context in which the masque was staged. In 1621 James called a parliament in a bid to win support for his daughter, Elizabeth, and her husband Frederick who had been driven out of Prague by Spanish forces. The parliament offered a platform for the Commons to bemoan the abuse of monopolies. Although Buckingham was not himself a monopolist, he did fix grants for his kin. Buckingham’s genius in The Gypsies Metamorphosed was to present himself in the role of a raffish rogue living outside the law, who is not so much threatening as endearingly charming. Certainly Jonson included passages that describes gypsies as attractive figures, with court ladies desiring to elope with them: ‘Justice Jug’s daughter, then sheriff of the country…running away with a kinsman of our captain’s…she great with juggling’. ‘Great with juggling’ implies the young woman’s pregnancy as a result of sexual play with her gypsy lover. Yet again, Jonson marries together the concepts of charm and sexuality. The affable, sensual qualities of the gypsy are closely aligned with that of Buckingham himself, something Buckingham recognised and light-heartedly capitalised on in The Gypsies Metamorphosed.
George Villiers was a part of the seventeenth-century Europe’s phenomenon of the minister-favourite. He was adored by his sovereign and enjoyed an intensely private, even sexual, relationship with his king. This intimacy was the primary source of the Duke of Buckingham’s political power. Through the medium of the court masque, Buckingham used his body as his charm offensive, and the tactic operated on a number of different levels. He underpinned his status as the favourite by expressions of homoerotic desire on the court stage. He flaunted his special intimacy with the king as his ‘slave’ and ‘dog’ as a means of not just entertaining the king, but also of letting others know just how close they are and how this afforded him to push the boundaries of courtly entertainment. Crucially, there was a deeper, political layer to this debonair show of physical skill and elegance; Buckingham was driven by political motivations, whether it be to supplant Carr officially as the king’s unrivalled favourite in The Golden Age Restored or respond to criticisms levelled against him after the 1621 parliament in The Gypsies Metamorphosed. George Villiers expressed his power and influence using the same tools that he won them with; his charm and his body, and used the court as a platform upon which to stage them.
