Assessing "Cultural Influence": James I as Patron of the Arts

Barroll, Leeds, Shakespeare Studies

RECENT cultural history has seemed inclined to foster a concept of King James and his English court based on seemingly contradictory but interdependent views. On one hand, many essays have depicted James I as a royal patron of the arts. We are often reminded, for example, that his first act in the literary realm was to take the theaters under his patronage because as part of his entertainment James demanded court performance of plays. He cared enough about public drama, it seems, to have assumed Shakespeare's own company under the new name of "the King's Men," and even to have assigned the remaining London troupes to other members of the royal family. Although these changes in the status of theater companies are of themselves unreliable indices of James's preoccupation with the London stage, (1) such evidence has encouraged scholars to make related assumptions about the role of the new king in other important initiatives--such as furthering the brilliant and fruitful collaboration of Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson in their series of opulent masques at court, appointing the poet John Donne Dean of Paul's, and, to be sure, ordering the translation project that resulted in the King James Bible.

The other side of this particular conceptual coin, curiously, is a concomitant view of the new king as somewhat incompetent--as lax, self-indulgent, and even slightly unsavory. An extreme example of such an attitude may be found in the observations of Roy Strong, who describes James as "the bloated, pedantic middle-aged father [of Prince Henry], careless of affairs of state, prepared to accept appeasement at any price, bent on the pleasure of the chase, totally unaesthetic, whose penchant for handsome courtiers was hardly becoming." Earlier, G. P. V. Akrigg's book on the Jacobean court, still popular with literary scholars, viewed James as a spend-thrift king, always absorbed in his current male favorite to the detriment of the state, and concerned with losing status if he did not maintain himself as the generous benefactor to his supporters, a practice which depleted the royal budget. (2)

Interestingly, this dualistic construction of James--as royal, generative patron of the arts or cultural icon, on the one hand, and as corrupt dawdler, on the other--has not been understood as troublingly inconsistent because indifference to politics and personal indolence in a learned king seem to many commentators to augur well for the arts--presumably, they flourish in such compost. It is almost as if absorption in the affairs of "high culture" is incompatible with the practice of statesmanship, or vice versa (at least in the case of James).

This essay, part of a larger effort to determine the structure and purpose of high cultural practices at court during the first decade of the Stuart reign, would interrogate the implications of James's dual image for our construction of the early court scene. In undertaking this limited analysis, I think it important to view James's situation not solely from the vantage point of his investment in belles lettres, but also in terms of the kinds of regnal problems to which he addressed himself at his accession. In other words, in order to reconfigure the misleading premises in so many portraits of the king, it is important here to assess James's relationship to the development of the arts in England in terms of his parallel assumption of monarchal responsibilities.

Accordingly, in what follows I shall be arguing two points. First, I would like to challenge the narrative of James's self-indulgent political ineptness, focusing primarily on representative activities surrounding the accession. Second, I hope to counter the view of King James as the primary instrument of high culture in the Stuart court by identifying the parameters of his intellectual interests, and by suggesting his own relative remoteness from contemporary currents of change in the arts.

There are, however, important caveats that need to be established in connection with both these points at the outset. It is clearly not feasible here, nor is it my intention, to offer an extensive analysis of James's style of governing, although recent revisionist studies have begun this task. (3) Instead, I have deliberately chosen to concentrate on events surrounding the first year of James's reign in order to demonstrate his political acumen and decisiveness--so reminiscent of his Scottish monarchal style. Although the framework of a single year may indeed seem limited in the context of a twenty-two-year reign, I would argue that James's activities in 1603 established a structure for governance in England that would function effectively for a decade. Significantly, this is the decade in which the arts burgeoned at the Stuart court, particularly the masque for which the court is renowned. Further, in describing James as a person with narrowly defined intellectual interests, I am hardly subscribing to popular caricatures of the King. On the contrary, although fundamentally unmoved by the artistic innovations that we might associate with the great accomplishments of the early Stuart period, he appears to have been excited by a traditionally academic form of intellectuality rooted in mid-sixteenth-century culture.

Any assessment of the new Stuart monarch at the turn of the century is best framed, in my view, in terms of his preceding persona as James VI of Scotland. There James was challenged by at least three critical problems: the political opposition of powerful Scottish earls to the entente generally beginning to prevail between the Crown and the other magnates who were indispensable to it; the efforts by the Kirk to gain autonomy and then political power through an elected internal hierarchy responsible in theory not to the King but only to God; and the threat of destabilization continually posed by blood feuds among the nobility, revenge patterns often bereft of any broad political goals. (4)

On the whole, James seems consistently and effectively to have managed these formidable threats to the stability of his Scottish kingdom. He dealt with hostile nobles by eventually destroying or neutralizing such threatening figures as Bothwell and the Gowries, even cooperating for a time with the implacable Bothwell. (5) Meanwhile he worked to stabilize Crown authority by creating or maintaining offices that functioned as lightning rods to absorb attack: Maitland's chancellorship, for example, and, after Maitland's death, the "Octavians" onto whom James displaced antimonarchist resentments. He outmaneuvered the Kirk by eventually pushing it from the political arena through counterpolemic or by carefully chosen confrontations. (6) And finally, he controlled blood feuds through deploying agents of court power in those localities where feuding was chronic. Having also (and usually in response to these initiatives) endured many assassination attempts in Scotland, the new English king was, in 1603, after many Scottish regnal years, hardly a political innocent, naively self-absorbed and sometimes destructively self-indulgent.

Yet as a consequence of the prevalence in some quarters of viewing James as politically foolish, many literary accounts have incompletely contextualized or even ignored significant activity surrounding his 1603 accession, omitting in the process important illustrative texts. (7) Yet it was 1603 that saw the formation of King James's inner circle of advisors, an important event to attend to here, if only because the James of English literary chronicles is also characterized as exclusively cultivating young favorites whom he presumably advanced to positions of power over the heads of more experienced and wiser nobles. (8) Through reference to well-known though seldom-invoked texts dealing with first decade of the Stuart reign, however, it is possible to shape a narrative somewhat different from the conventional one.

Central to this revised narrative is the so-called secret correspondence, well before Queen Elizabeth's death, between James VI and Robert Cecil, the queen's First Secretary. This correspondence demonstrates James's skilled instrumentality in the cooperative effort to work out the political details of his quiet and assured succession to the English throne. The succession effort principally involved Robert Cecil, but others also contributed to it, including Henry Lord Howard, younger brother of the Duke of Norfolk (Norfolk's letters to James's mother, Mary Queen of Scots, as well as other activities, had led to his execution in 1572 in the Tower). Northumberland, whose earldom was situated closest to Edinburgh, and who was married to Dorothy, one of the two sisters of the lately decapitated Earl of Essex, was also a party to the correspondence. (9) But Henry Lord Howard, the future Earl of Northampton, and Robert Cecil, the future Earl of Salisbury, were the principal figures, and James's initial actions with the English nobility--deliberate and, it would seem, well planned--reflected the Cecil and Howard view of the English situation.

Their dominance of this intrigue excluded those whom they regarded as enemies: Sir Walter Ralegh, Captain of Queen Elizabeth's Guard, and Henry Brook, 11th Lord Cobham, Warden of the Cinque Ports. (10) Cobham's position, especially, was a strong one because England, much to the admiration of some foreigners, was able to exercise control over its boundaries far more stringently than could a partially land-bound area such as "France." The Warden of the Cinque Ports supervised the bureaucracy that administered the seaports, and his authority extended even to the nobility, who were required to show passports when entering or leaving England. Thus Ralegh, official guard over the monarch's body, and Cobham, controller of access to England by sea, might jointly have proved formidable if anarchy had edged into the immediate power vacuum resulting from the death of the heirless Queen Elizabeth. But by presumably acquiescing in Cecil's and Henry Lord Howard's view of things, James of Scotland gambled that these nobles and their associates could deliver the English throne to him--and of course they did. On 31 March, only a week after the Queen's death, and shortly after Charles Percy, brother of the Earl of Northumberland, and Thomas Somerset, son of the Earl of Worcester, Master of the Horse, rode north as the official messengers announcing James's accession, he was proclaimed King, and with scarcely any of the difficulties and obstacles many had feared. (11) The conventional narrative of the quiet beginning of the Stuart reign seems to represent this peaceful transition even as axiomatic, but perhaps this is because James's political adroitness lay just here: in maneuvering to avoid opposition, and thereby presiding over a historical interlude devoid of drama. (12)

The first month after his accession saw the formation of those key associations of James that would dominate the first ten years of the new reign. On 11 April, for example, James wrote the Privy Council of England, summoning Robert Cecil north to Scotland to convey to him their consensus on the timing of the state funeral of Queen Elizabeth, the coronation, and the procession south into England of the royal court of his consort, Queen Anna, as well as various other matters "not fit for paper neither fit for us to resolve of, until we hear from you of our Privy Council." Cecil, riding north with his fellow in the secret correspondence, Henry Lord Howard, met up with James in York where the three talked for an hour before the ceremonial dinner to be given for the new King by the Lord Mayor of that city. (13) Cecil then returned to London while James continued his leisurely progress, attended by Henry Lord Howard, who by 25 April (when Howard wrote Cecil that James had decided upon his new Lord Chamberlain), was already entrusted with overseeing access to the king and inditing letters for him (Hatfield, 15:58).

The Chamberlainship was an important and powerful office, coveted by many earls and barons--an anachronistic combination of royal household duties reaching back to the twelfth century and of much wider, seventeenth-century administrative responsibilities involving constant access to the monarch. Thus one contemporary described the Lord Chamberlain as "the greatest governor in the king's house."

   He disposeth of all things above stairs. He hath a greater command of the
   King's guard than the captains hath. He makes all the [court] chaplains,
   chooseth most of the King's servants, and all the persuivants. (14)

James had apparently resolved early in his progress to London (15) to maintain the temporary appointment of Thomas Lord Howard of Walden made by Queen …

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Publication information: Article title: Assessing "Cultural Influence": James I as Patron of the Arts. Contributors: Barroll, Leeds - Author. Journal title: Shakespeare Studies. Publication date: Annual 2001. Page number: 132+. © 1998 Associated University Presses. COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group.

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