The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe

Thus the English poet and satirist John Skelton mocked Cardinal Wolsey’s power and pretensions as Henry VIII’s chief minister and England’s ‘alter rex’ in 1523 (Walker 1988, 159). He also provided a useful summary of the elements of the early modern royal court. It was, first and foremost, the locality and residence of the monarch. It had to appear in every sense excellent, to maintain his or her honour and reputation as a great prince. It was therefore also a theatre for the display of the material magnificence of monarchy to domestic and foreign observers. Finally, it was a place of resort and meeting, of supplication, negotiation and exchange between the sovereign and subject and between him or her and the representatives of other rulers. An elite material culture – architecture, tapestry, furniture, clothing, gifts – was central to the operation of these three functions in expressing and enabling the dynamics of power and petition. The court was characterised by different spaces and places, each carrying greater or lesser status, depending on its use by the monarch and how much access it afforded to the king or queen. This status was reflected in the degree of luxury with which it was furnished and decorated.

As Skelton knew, the royal court was at the heart of monarchical government because the sovereign was perceived as a semi-divine, transcendent and sacred creature, the very fount of honour, esteem and favour for the nobility and gentry. Being in his or her company was a privilege and an honour craved by what we might call the ‘political community’. This demand had to be directed, controlled and choreographed, and this was done primarily through the court. The sovereign’s exalted status was there affirmed and acted out daily in dozens of elaborate rituals and protocols. There were also periods of entertainment and interaction between the ruler and the members of the social and political elite upon whose support royal authority most directly depended. In these encounters, the sovereign could assess an individual’s personal qualities and suitability for service. He or she formed friendships and distributed favours ranging from personal recognition in a smile to titles and wealthy sinecures. Therein lay the court’s compelling power and charm, its magic even, for early modern monarchical society.

The court was, then, the chief site for the expression of what we might today call the ‘soft power’ of monarchy. Throughout Europe, the ‘hard power’, that is the legal and administrative capacity of the crown, had once also been encompassed within the royal court in a range of administrative departments which served the sovereign both as ruler and as the greatest lord of the realm. Over time, however, these fiscal and legal offices – in the English context the Exchequer, Chancery and other legal tribunals of common law and equity – had ‘gone out of court’ (taking the name with them) and established themselves permanently in royal capitals. Yet this still left very many offices of royal government in the sovereign’s personal gift and these, together with those available in service on the royal desmene, were still organised and mediated through the sovereign’s household.

Borne on by the demand for these offices which could only be obtained through access, direct or indirect, to the ruler, European courts reached their greatest numerical and spatial extents between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. In seeking to explain the origins of this expansion, historians have looked back to crises of royal power experienced in many parts of Europe in the preceding two centuries. In England and the Iberian Peninsula, for example, there were bitter dynastic civil wars in the later fifteenth century in which the authority and prestige of the crown had been seriously challenged by ‘overmighty’ noble subjects. In France, the Netherlands and the Austro-Germans lands there had also been serious popular, municipal and noble revolts and here, too, monarchs sought more effective institutions of royal power. In the aftermath of these conflicts, the Tudors in England, the Trastamara dynasty in Spain and the primary branch of the Valois in France sought to draw their supporters into closer bonds of personal loyalty and to overawe any potential new challengers to their power.

Court history

Most of the ground-breaking research in comprehending the vital role the court played in this process has focused on the monarchies of England and of France – although it took some time for it properly to be understood. There was, for example, little room for the royal court in most accounts of the ascendancy of the monarchy over the nobility of early modern England published in the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. Theories of a ‘New’, more despotic, monarchy which outflanked the nobility by recruiting to its service middle-ranking gentlemen-bureaucrats reached their apogee in G.R. Elton’s thesis of a ‘Tudor revolution’ in government. There was no place in his view for the court save as the monarch’s private household and a centre of social and cultural patronage. Political power had shifted to administrators and councillors (Elton 1969).

Conversely, among historians of the French monarchy at this time, the court was being given a very direct role in a rather similar story of the growth of bureaucratic monarchical power. This school of thought was articulated at its fullest by the German-born sociologist Norbert Elias who, following his earlier study of human institutions in The Civilising Process (1939), published The Court Society (1983). The book focused on the reign of Louis XIV and argued that the ‘Sun-King’ made the nobility dance attendance upon him at Versailles while his own officials fanned out over the kingdom, ensuring it was efficiently administered in his interests and laying the foundations of the modern state. The court was, according to Elias and others, the means by which the monarchy not only contained the nobility but fundamentally changed its manners and mores in ways that made it disown its own power and recognise its dependence upon the crown. This was the meaning, it was argued, of the much-quoted observation, wrongly attributed to Louis, ‘L’Etat, c’est moi’. Yet the idea of the court as a lever of ‘absolutist’ royal power proved influential in many accounts of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European monarchies.

These contrasting views of the importance, or otherwise, of the court were each subjected to substantial revision in the 1980s and afterwards. Led by historians such as David Starkey and Eric Ives, among others, Elton’s view of the English court as of no political significance was proven to be misconceived. The revisionists were able to show close and extensive organisational and operational links between the informal sphere of the court and the other institutions of power such as the royal council. They were able to show, moreover, that the personal interactions between the monarch and his or her close friends, operating as household servants, were vital elements of ‘the politics of intimacy’ in the early-modern world (Starkey 1977, 187–224; Coleman and Starkey 1986). They showed that nobles and gentry increasingly focused their ambitions for political success and social esteem upon the royal court as it became less and less worth their while to challenge the monarchy outright. In this view, rather than fighting each other in the country as they had done in the mid-fifteenth century, the nobles fought at court over offices, promotions and policies (Ives 1972; Starkey 1987). In this context, nobles might no longer have had to spend money on arms and armour, but, as courtiers, they still placed great emphasis on their personal appearance and that of their entourages. Clothing made of the finest fabrics in the latest fashions and jewellery of the costliest possible materials and design expressed their wealth, cultural sophistication and personal patronage of talented artisans. Wearing these items was intended to distinguish the owner in the crowded spaces of the court, to attract potential clients and to intimidate rivals. It expressed an individual’s status and asserted claims to be comfortable in the metaphorical ‘corridors of power’.

Meanwhile the view of the French court as simply an instrument with which the ‘absolutist’ monarch emasculated the nobility was being seriously questioned. The relationship between the king and his elite subjects was shown to be far more nuanced and mutually interdependent than Elias’ model allowed, and the rhetoric of royal power was shown often to outrun the reality (Mettam 1988; Duindam 2003). Lacking any of the institutions of modern state control, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century kings were in danger of appearing, like the mythical emperor, without any clothes. True, Louis did want his nobles to attend upon him at court where he could keep an eye on them. If they did, however, he would be available to them and might offer assistance and advancement in myriad ways. The king might no longer appoint the highest-ranking nobles to principal army commands and the like as of right, as his predecessors had done, but he still made it worth their while to cooperate with him. He insisted upon his right to appoint on merit but still drew most of his commanders and royal officials from among more junior nobles within the clientage networks of the ‘grands’ and thereby esteemed the latter as individuals of great consequence in the kingdom. Like their English court-history colleagues, the revisionist historians of the French court explained it as a site of interaction, of cooperation and at times competition, between a monarch whose power was limited in practical terms and his elite subjects and between those subjects themselves (Beik 1985; Mettam 1988; Henshall 1992).

During the 1990s these insights were debated, further developed and applied in a wide range of studies of individual royal courts and collections of essays comparing and contrasting courts throughout Europe and beyond. Learned societies were established specifically for the study of the court, and a new generation of early modern scholars began to explore the connections between the court and the other institutions of royal government and between the court and the localities, and its role in diplomacy. These scholars also brought within the purview of court studies other traditional areas of historical research such as art and architectural history, the history of design, furnishings and furniture, music, textiles and clothing, of theatre and of ritual (Asch and Birke 1991; Oresko et al. 1997; Adamson 1999; Cruickshanks 2000; Châtenet 2002; Mears 2003; Hayward 2007). More recently still, new studies of courts beyond Europe have emerged which owe much to pioneering European studies (Fuess and Hartung 2010). Today it would be virtually impossible to write a history of any early modern European monarchy or even a biography of an individual ruler without reference to the complex world of the royal court.

Physical spaces

The particular arrangements and modes of operation of royal courts varied tremendously across Europe, but the majority were designed to create materially luxurious and even intimidating spaces in which to accommodate the private person of the ruler and his or her family and also to present sovereign power publicly. Over time, different dynastic and national traditions were built up in regulating these matters, but all ensured that the space immediately around the monarch was privileged and distinct. Yet these traditions were always subject to change and reinvention in ways that reflected the personality and gender of individual monarchs. Some, like Louis XIV, interacted easily and naturally with large numbers of their elite subjects daily. Others, like Henry VII of England, did not. Rituals, spaces and protocols at court were shaped according to such needs and preferences. Offices were routinely created, disbanded and reinvented. The courts of the Habsburgs were, for example, among the most varied in the early modern period. The emperor Charles V had very different arrangements in his native Burgundian household at Brussels from those in his courts in Spain, where traditions of more open access to the sovereign, dating from the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, were observed. The court of the Austrian Habsburgs developed its own style in the reigns of the emperors Ferdinand I and Rudolf II (Duindam 2003). There was nothing permanent about the apparently traditional world of the royal court.

Most European courts were organised into two broad departments: one for the ceremonial, public and also private life of the monarch (the domus magnificentiae) and another to house and organise the catering and other services (the domus providentiae). These might loosely be compared to the ‘upstairs, downstairs’ arrangements in a Victorian or Edwardian country house. In practice, there were a number of sub-departments within these two spheres, with a wide variety of nomenclatures. In England, for example, from the time of Henry VII, the court was divided into the Hall or Household, the King’s Chamber and the Privy Chamber. The Hall was the largest public space within the manor or palace, and most people who were reasonably attired and well behaved would be allowed access to it. It was here that the servants of the household ate and slept on straw and on pallet beds. The department of the Chamber covered a number of smaller, more ornate, rooms such as the Great Watching Chamber, where the sovereign’s formal guard was mounted, and the Presence Chamber, where the monarch would usually eat in public and receive high-ranking visitors and ambassadors. Beyond the Presence Chamber lay the smallest, most ornate rooms, the private apartments of the sovereign, to which most courtiers only occasionally (if ever) gained access.

Similar arrangements obtained in the courts of the Valois dukes of Burgundy (which were influential on England). Like its English counterpart, the French court was divided into three main departments: the chapelle, the hôtel, with its various sub-departments, and the chambre, the king’s private living space (Knecht 2008). There were usually also several companies of mounted and/or foot guards. In addition, all European courts had ‘outside’ departments such as the stables and those responsible for hunting equipment, dogs and birds. There were also permanent storage facilities (in England, the Great Wardrobe) for maintaining furniture, textiles and other equipment when not needed at court during its annual cycle of activities.

The display of the material wealth and taste of the monarch was a major role of the domus magnificentiae. The capacity of the sovereign to be a patron, to express material liberality or ‘magnificence’ (as opposed to mere extravagance) was expressed through rich fabrics and furnishing in these areas and in the display of objects created by the foremost artists and artisans at the monarch’s command. Conscious of their princely rivals’ efforts in this sphere, most European monarchs strove to create a reputation for themselves as great patrons and to attract international artistic talent to their courts. The building of new palaces and their decoration was the principal means of creating such an impression, and several early modern monarchs, not least Henry VIII, Francis I and Louis XIV, were great builders. Second only to buildings in expense, tapestries and hangings, woven with gold and silver thread, were the single-most impressive items of royal patronage. They were admired as much for their material worth as for the talent deployed in creating them. The fashion for Italianate classical imagery, allusions and metaphors that informed early modern aesthetics was articulated most fully at court. Sculptures and portraits of the monarchs themselves became increasingly popular items of royal patronage, but vast collections of clothing, jewellery, gold and silver or silver-gilt plate and tableware remained the principal means of display in European royal courts (Thurley 1993; Cox-Rearick 1995; Campbell 1999).

Access and competition at court

As noted, the central organisational principle of the court was the regulation of access to the monarch. This was a matter of privilege, based on social status, official position and personal relationship. Those servants who worked in the outer Household had no such access save when the monarch appeared in public, as when dining in the Great Hall. The aristocrats normally had reasonably free access to at least the outer rooms of the royal apartments, almost as of right. At the other end of the spectrum were lower-ranked (and often younger) nobles and gentry, who held office as pages, grooms, ushers and so on, employed in keeping doors, fetching and carrying clothes and other requisites as required. Nobles of intermediate status generally attended the ruler at particular times of the day, such as his rising and retiring and mealtimes. There were numerous officers such as carvers, cupbearers, bread carriers and the like who ceremonially prepared the last stage of the ruler’s meals when brought up from the kitchens before serving them on gold and silver dishes. Depending on the different court traditions, these table servants might be able to address the sovereign at certain times in the course of a meal or, better still, be called near for a more private chat as a mark of esteem.

Being the creation of patriarchal societies, these patterns of access and spatial relations evolved primarily for the courts of male monarchs. Men could act as body servants to the king in his private apartments and women could serve the queen consort in a similar capacity in hers. In a female monarchy, of course, things were very different. Men could not serve as body servants to a queen sovereign, although, as with queens consort, they might hold positions within her household such as ushers and chamberlains which involved no direct contact with her for any of her more private needs. In practice, the wives and daughters of prominent male councilors and courtiers occupied these positions in the household of a female sovereign, holding posts such as ladies of honour, ladies in waiting and the like (Harris 1990; 2002).

At his accession in 1515, Francis I of France created a new court office that rapidly became one of the most important ever created, not just at the French court but throughout Europe. This was the office of gentilhomme de la chambre du roi which, over time, replaced the older and more widely held office of chambellan du roi. The role of the gentilhomme was to attend the king not merely as a servant but as a companion in his private apartments or when he hunted, travelled or did anything in the course of his day. Its nearest antecedent would appear to be that of the écuyer de la chambre in the household of Charles the Bold of Burgundy. An account of his household, written in 1474 by Oliver de la Marche, describes the duke as having a group of 16 young men who were:

The evidence is that Francis I’s gentilshommes de la chambre and all those who had analogous offices in European courts performed very similar functions and had very similar privileges of access. The titles and roles of these special servants evolved further under the Stuarts in England, the Bourbons in France and elsewhere in Europe, and queens sovereign and consort had women who held analogous positions in their private chambers.

Because of the unprecedented access this office gave, it rapidly became politically significant and most highly desirable. Once in the king or queen’s presence, these courtiers had opportunities to press for favours for themselves and others. They could suggest suitable people from among their own affinities of family and friends for vacant royal offices and sinecures at court and elsewhere. The ruler might also seek their opinion on these and other matters that formally came within the remit of the royal council, often to the intense frustration of councillors. The opportunities for this kind of influence (which all courtiers craved as a mark of their own significance in the regime) were immediately obvious but not always easy to manage.

Who, then, were early-modern ‘courtiers’ and what did they do? Modern cinematic reconstructions of royal courts invariably focus on entertainment, which was but one aspect of court life. Scenes of feasting, dancing, card-playing, gossip and intrigue have their place, but (as we have seen) most courtiers were actually in the royal household to work. They served the monarch personally in one of a wide variety of capacities as well as forming the primary audience for the display of monarchy to the kingdom. Historians of the royal court have noted how having such influence brought political kudos and credit to individual courtiers. They have also noted that court life was characterised by frequent rises and falls in favour among individual courtiers. In some courts, notoriously that of Henry VIII, rises in favour brought spectacular rewards in their train, and equally spectacular falls were routinely fatal. Elsewhere, the consequences of the loss of royal favour were not usually lethal, but dismissal from service entailed political and social disgrace which was a form of living death for those who suffered it.

While trying to maintain, indeed monopolise, the sovereign’s favour was the name of the game, it was very hard for most individuals to achieve. Not everyone could be a gentilhomme de la chambre du roi, after all. Like monarchs themselves, individual courtiers sought to create what, in an English context, was known as an ‘affinity’, a collective of family members and more distant relations, friends and clients who would support them in securing royal favour, in hopes of promoting the whole collective socially and politically. The leader of an affinity would try to secure the spoils of favour and distribute them among its members. Here women often played a crucial role. Francis I of France said that one could not have a court without women. He voiced gallantly the contemporary convention that women, in their beauty, dress and deportment, adorned the court; they were the ‘wags’ of their time. But as queens regnant, as mothers, mistresses and sisters of monarchs and as relatives of prominent noblemen, women could be powerful patrons in their own right. The careers of Agnès Sorel, Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn and Anne of Austria, among many others, demonstrate that women were powerful forces in early modern court society.

In their more aggressive guise, court collectives were disparaged as ‘factions’, and since the 1980s this concept has been much explored and deployed by historians in explaining how court politics worked. Eric Ives provided what is perhaps the classic definition of a Tudor ‘faction’, one which could equally well apply to the phenomenon in most royal courts of the early modern period. He described it as a web of personal ties, an alliance to secure spoils but a political axis as well, seeking to promote particular politicians and particular policies (Ives 1972, 181).

There has been some scepticism in more recent years about the usefulness of the idea of faction, but it remains difficult to find another concept which so neatly defines the kinds of temporary and shifting alliances observable among early-modern courtiers (Adams 1982). Factions were not political ‘parties’ in any modern sense, although as Ives also pointed out, they might over time become associated with particular ideological positions – such as favouring, or opposing, religious change within the kingdom. Confronted with the personality of their sovereign and amidst the crowded surroundings of the court where gossip, back-stabbing and plotting were endemic, it made sense for people to work together to promote one or more of their number whose rise would enable them to achieve their individual and collective aims. The real objectives of such groups were rarely stated openly. Instead, they sought to manipulate the ruler’s ambitions, dreams and anxieties in order to increase their own influence with him or her and to diminish that of others. Their aims achieved, however, the reason for cooperation might cease, and new groupings could form. Factional leaders always ran the risk that unless they ensured the flow of the spoils of influence to their friends, they might quite suddenly find themselves bereft of followers, leaving them at best diminished figures in court society, or worse, out of royal favour altogether. These relationships were often fostered and maintained through the exchange of gifts between courtiers of equal rank and between them and their patrons or clients. In addition to the gifts of offices or access they could arrange for their friends and clients, presents of food, of coins, medallions, necklaces, clothing, weapons and hunting equipment were given, received and displayed in token of loyalty, affection and protection between individuals. Hospitality in their own houses to friends and clients was an important aspect, indeed duty, of the nobles and gentry. It operated, with varying degrees of generosity, up and down the social scale.

In all of this, the role of the sovereign was crucial as the fount of patronage. As the court began to take on its sixteenth-century form, contemporary commentators including Machiavelli, Sir Thomas More, Erasmus and most famously of all Baldesar Castiglione in his The Book of the Courtier (1528) assessed, with varying degrees of criticism, the operation of the court. All warned rulers against the flattery and self-serving advice that was the stock in trade, they alleged, of courtiers and counsellors. In The Prince, Machiavelli opined that ‘a prince who is not wise himself, will never take good advice’ (1992, 110–111). Yet he also advised the ruler to use the ambitions of jostling courtiers to his own advantage by fostering competition between them that served his own power and kept him at the centre of everything. Castiglione discussed the same issue and advised the prospective courtier how to flatter without flattery and how to have a certain nonchalance, or ease of manner, that he called ‘sprezaturra’, such that his motives and sincerity would never be challenged, enabling him ever to retain the favour of his prince, who would be honoured by his servant’s skill and élan (1967, 65–69).

Surrounded as he or she was by an army of courtiers and councillors all pressing for attention and to be of use, the human person of the monarch might understandably seek ways of being distanced from elite subjects. This might involve, as it did in England, creating acres of private space where the sovereign could retreat with a few trusted courtiers for long periods of the day. Alternatively, as was more common among Continental monarchies, rulers might build numerous palaces of pleasure or ‘retreat’, such as Louis XIV’s château at Marly, which were smaller, less hierarchically organised, less formal in operation and focussed on leisure activity such as hunting. In such places they might escape, at least temporarily, the madding crowd. Of course the opportunity to be with sovereigns when they kicked their shoes off and chose to be ‘themselves’, as we might say, was itself an extraordinary and exquisite privilege craved by the very courtiers from whom they were trying to escape; hence stories of courtiers whispering in Louis’s ear, or while executing a bow in a crowded reception room, ‘Sire, Marly?’

Monarchs also came to depend as never before on key individuals whom they trusted and who could help shoulder the burden of government. Royal favourites were as perennial a feature of monarchy as the royal court itself, but the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries constituted the great age of ‘courtier-ministers’. These men, usually of outstanding ability and capacity for work, were entrusted with an enormous range of responsibilities, often encompassing within their authority the often-conflicting worlds of the council and the court; the formal and informal aspects of royal power and authority. The list of their names reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ of early modern government: Wolsey, Cromwell, Montmorency, Gattinara, Granville, William and Robert Cecil, the Count-Duke Olivares, Sully, Oxenstierna, Richelieu and Mazarin, to name only the most prominent. Faced with the range of tasks and depending for their own success on maintaining the trust of their monarch, these ministers tended to adopt one of two strategies to deal with the turbulent world of the court. Some, such as Wolsey or the Cecils, tried to limit the courtiers’ ability to influence the monarch by reducing the ways they could interact with the monarch unsupervised. As far as possible, they also concentrated decision making in the council which they dominated. Others, like Cromwell or Montmorency, became ‘super-courtiers’ and themselves held high office in the king’s private service, there to ensure that they, or at least their nominees, enjoyed preponderant influence with him. Neither strategy was ever entirely successful because controlling both the court and the council was extraordinarily difficult. Nevertheless, most of these men managed to have relatively long, if never untroubled, careers in royal service (Elliott and Brockliss 1999).

So the royal court was a central feature of early modern government. The study of court history is then, as one commentator has noted, ‘not a nostalgic look at the glamour of deposed or defunct royalty, but a study of the mechanisms of power, personnel, patronage and public image, which yields insights applicable across historical periods and different cultural contexts’ (Campbell-Orr 1999). The evidence of their role assists us in understanding, or at least imagining, how political power was expressed materially and personally in early modern Europe. It enables us to trace how, without modern military or bureaucratic establishments or communication and compliance networks, monarchy actually worked as a system of government for hundreds of years. The material culture of the court was central to its operation. It had to be a site of physical magnificence, in the scale of its buildings and spaces and in the quality of its furnishing and decoration. This magnificence expressed royal economic power and status, as did the way the court operated as a ‘machine’ of government with its various places and spaces. These were populated by large numbers of people who served the monarch personally in a range of capacities in the court itself and whose own networks of friends, clients and patrons constituted the ‘royal affinity’, the eyes and ears, the hands and feet, of the monarch in the localities. Their own material displays in the forms of dress and deportment, gift-giving and entertainment, reflected as far as they could those of the monarch and reinforced the social hierarchy thought crucial for an ordered society, and of which the monarch was the head.

Nowadays royal courts may only exist in Europe in a vestigial form, in the constitutional monarchies, shorn of all real power beyond a narrow social elite, but in many other parts of the modern world they still function much as they have done for centuries. Informal ‘courts’ surround modern prime ministers and presidents, the chief executives of large corporations and university vice-chancellors. Hierarchies seem endemic in human organisation, and somewhere close to the top of any hierarchy will be found the elements at least of a court. For there, as John Skelton reminds us, is the site of all ‘confluence, suits and supplications’. Though ancient in origin, the concept of the court remains an adaptable and useful model for understanding human power relationships.

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4The royal court

Court history

Physical spaces

Access and competition at court

Bibliography

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The royal court