Mixed Government and Mixed Marriage in A King and No King: Sir Henry Neville Reads Beaumont and Fletcher

Abstract

The diplomat John Nicholas may have been the first, though certainly not the last, to read a royalist politics in Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s A King and No King (1611). Writing to Lord Clarendon in April, 1654 from the Dutch court of Mary Stuart, Princess Royal of Orange and sister to Charles II, Nicholas reported that “the gentlemen and maides of honour to the Princess Royal are preparing to act a play . . . the very name of which seems to please many in her Court . . . it being so judicious and discreetly chosen, viz. A King and no King; but all loyal persons are astonished when they hear it named.” Four months after Oliver Cromwell was named Protector, Nicholas apparently saw the play, or at least its title, as a sarcastic commentary on the paradoxically regal pretensions of the regicide, who had begun signing documents in the royal manner: “Oliver P.”1 Twelve years earlier, the anonymous author of The Last News in London, published only eleven days before the Battle of Edgehill, also read the play in the context of the Civil War, though this time as a subversive attack on monarchy. In the pamphlet, a country gentleman and a citizen, both royalists, discuss the latest news from the capital: