Reading the Royal Romance: Or, Intimacy in a King's Cabinet

Abstract

Social and cultural articulations of the body have lately constituted one of the liveliest areas of early-modern scholarship. Privacy, gender roles, separate spheres, domesticity, all have been the subjects of intense inquiry, which has thrown light on the assumptions and conventions that structured the experience of people in the past. Concerned as such inquiry has largely been with the daily lives of ordinary people, it has moved far - farther certainly than did the 'new social history' of a couple of decades ago - from the conventional staging-posts of political history. Few of the scholars involved would doubt that broad shifts in human values have occurred,1 though they have sometimes had difficulty in explaining them.2 The emergence of privacy, as ideology and as practice, is a case in point. Almost by definition, privacy's emergence has been imagined at some distance from historians' familiar, and public, high road of political change. Philippe Aries certainly confessed to a belated recognition of a political matrix in which the 'private' was held in dynamic tension with a more 'public' order that developed in the later seventeenth century; but his collaborators in the early-modern volume in the History of Private Life turned away from politics to a world of social and cultural practices. Their unconcern with contingency is underscored by their repeated shifts in focus between 'private life' - a life separate or removed from 'the public' - and 'private lives', that is, the lives of ordinary people.3 Such slippage betrays an underlying assumption that the history of privacy and of the middle class are intimately, indeed almost teleologically, linked. And not only the history of privacy: the most analytical of recent writings on the history of women and of manhood have focused firmly on the rise of the middle class as agent of change.4 Despite a plethora of recent studies of political culture, historians have been oddly reluctant to concede to politics a role in cultural transformation. It is tempting to see this as one more consequence of revisionism: as the domain of politics shrank to the short-term and contingent, it seemed to have little to do with longer-term shifts in outlook. Malcolm Gaskill has been something of a lone voice in calling for attention to 'the political dimension of mentalities'.5The political dimension of culture and mentality cannot, however, be mapped merely in terms of state-formation. Circumstance, politics, and the traumas of civil war and revolution also had their place. Indeed, at what seems a turning-point in the story - the emergence in England of an explicit debate over personal privacy - evidence points in what must seem a surprising direction, inviting us to reconsider the emphasis given to the middle class. Some of England's earliest articulations of a claim to privacy, and more particularly of privacy as the setting for intimacy and affectivity, involved not an urban pioneer of politeness but a king. Such a contention may seem paradoxical, since spectacle and early-modern monarchy are so often deemed inseparable; but as Ernst Kantorowicz recognised years ago, the social ambiguity of the human body - irreducibly physical and individual yet unavoidably implicated in the polity - centered on the person of the king.6 The politics of that ambiguity were of course explored and contested in the pamphlet warfare of the early 1640s, and brutally answered by the regicides. Its human meaning, exposed by the capture and publication of Charles I's correspondence in 1645, has not been sufficiently understood, and nor has its part in the history of privacy.The human dilemmas of intimacy scarcely come to mind as a major theme in England's mid-century troubles. The two prime combatants have become emblems of quite other values: the King, of style and dignity in all eventualities; Oliver Cromwell, of a strenuous appeal to interior truths. Neither posture left much space for the concealments of the affective life. …