Street Politics: Charles I and the Inns of Court's Triumph of Peace

Abstract

The circumstances leading to the most spectacular and expensive masque witnessed in England, James Shirley's The Triumph of Peace, began with a puritan's dream of an England free of playhouses, a dispute between the Soapboilers of Westminster and the Soapboilers of London about who could legitimately claim to produce the best soap, and the desperate need for Inns' students to help soothe the conflicts arising from these disagreements. In the four-and-a-half months between the publication of William Prynne's anti-theatrical tract Histriomastix in early November 1633, and the death of the Lord Mayor, Ralph Freeman, on 16 March 1634, these political conflicts became a crisis, and I discuss here the central role that the law students at the Inns of Court played both in mediating relations between London and the Crown and identifying the Inns of Court before the citizens of London and Charles I himself, as institutions fundamental to England's peace and success.I endeavour to reconsider the circumstances surrounding Shirley's masque by taking advantage of a greater fund of historical evidence than that which has been available to critics in the past (Stephen Orgel, Lawrence Venuti, and Martin Butler in particular1) - evidence that sharpens our understanding of how the City of London, the Inns, and the Crown invested in an increasingly unstable paradigm of institutional relations. By introducing new material from City archives into scholarly discussion of the masque, the research of C. E. McGee increases our understanding of the interaction between the contending forces of institutional power in London at this time, and invites us to reconsider the lawyers' commitment to the masque's production in relation to that of the City rather than merely that of the Crown.2 John R. Elliott Jr's article includes a complete, annotated transcription of Folger MS Z.e.1 (item 25), entitled 'The Manner of the Progression of the Masque', which Jerzy Limon discovered in 1988 and which records the identities of many of the Inns' participants.3 Finally, N. W. Bawcutt's 1996 edition of the Records of Sir Henry Herbert (Master of Revels from 1623-73) provides a thorough account of Charles's and Henrietta Maria's involvement in dramatic performances.4Drawing largely from Bulstrode Whitelock's substantial recollections of the masque, which he recorded in his Memorials of the English Affairs (1682) some thirty years after its two performances, Orgel, Venuti, and Butler discuss the masque's intervention in the tenuous relationship between the Inns and Charles in terms of the masque's ability to disguise criticism as compliment. While the 'nature of the medium' may well have convinced 'the royal solipsist' to see 'nothing . . . but adulation' in episodes of the masque that read as the lawyers' critique of royal prerogative and Charles's policies regarding monopolies,5 evidence presented by McGee, Elliott, and Bawcutt, as well as my examination of the Inns' records, compels us to understand the masque's dialectical rhetoric as an imperative strategy of its production. While Paul Raffield has recently argued that 'the contents of the masque itself confirmed the impression that the corporate intention of the Inns of Court was to present themselves as pliant servants of an absolute monarch',6 I contend that embedded in this intention is an intricate strategy of mediation with a regime whose exploitative economic demands betrayed the 'majesty of kingship' and 'putative imperium of Charles I'.7 The masque was part of a complexly negotiated conversation among the individual Inns, the City authorities, and the Crown - yet the language of this conversation was underpinned by money to such a degree that the galvanised lawyers and City aldermen had to transform abruptly the established protocols of discourse with the 'mystical person' of the king.8 The problem was that the social magic that had made access to the Crown so coveted was, more than ever before, dependent on the money that Charles derived from monopolies to refurbish the court's infrastructure. …