TWENTY-SEVEN
CORYATE’S CRUDITIES
At least within his own circle, Henry could relax. It was a great pleasure to him to grant Thomas Coryate’s request for an audience at St James’s. Coryate had spent the last couple of years compiling a travel book from his notes, ‘for the nourishment of the travelling Members of this Kingdome’. He requested Henry become its patron and the prince consented. Delighted with himself, Coryate engaged Henry’s engraver, William Hole, to create the plates and asked a few friends to contribute the usual little puff pieces for the front pages of his Crudities.
One or two verses arrived for the book. Then people began to answer each other’s poems. Soon others, unsolicited, put in their contribution. Coryate’s Somerset patrons, and Henry’s officers, Sir Edward Phelips and his son Sir Robert, contributed. Inigo Jones sent a poem. So did John Donne. Donne very much wanted service with the prince; yet he found himself thwarted repeatedly by his reluctant, irate father-in-law, Sir George More, who was also Henry’s Receiver General, and who sent his own poem.
Ben Jonson wrote the introductory character sketch. Henry’s friend John Harington (as ‘Ajax Harington’) and Adam Newton offered a few lines. Sir Lewis Lewkenor, the king’s Master of Ceremonies, and the wealthy merchant, financier, and businessman, Lionel Cranfield, added their pieces. Richard Martin MP, lawyer-orator, and his friend, Laurence Whitaker, who was Edward Phelips’s secretary, contributed. So did Hugh Holland, Christopher Brooke MP, and John Hoskyns, another lawyer-orator. Many versifiers attended on Henry directly. About thirty per cent of them were also MPs, members of the Inns of Court, members of the Virginia Company and the Northwest Passage Company. And many were tavern wits. Thomas Campion, writer of masques contributed, as did John Owen, the epigrammatist. Michael Drayton, Henry’s poet and organiser of royal spectacles, and John Davies of Hereford, Henry’s writing master, had all piled in answering each other and bantering in verse. Soon Coryate was buried in over sixty of the things – far too many. The epigraphs had taken on a life of their own.
Henry commanded Coryate to read them all to him and the household. When Coryate finished he told the prince he would select the choicest (most flattering) and publish the rest separately. Not a bit of it, Henry insisted all the voices from his court must be included. These were their friends and acquaintances and some were bound to mock gently, while others simply heaped praise. The travel book acquired a very long preface, the ‘Banquet of the Wits’.
Coryate showed up at St James’s Palace, early on Easter Monday evening, 1611, his precious tomes packed into panniers on the back of a donkey.
Henry received him in the Privy Chamber, surrounded by the contributors and mutual friends. ‘Most scintillant Phosphorus of our British Trinacria [three-cornered land],’ Coryate began, bowing his nose almost low enough to sweep the ground with it. Coryate straightened up and off he went. ‘With this May-dew of my crude collections, I have now filled this new-laid egg-shell, not doubting of the like effect in your Highness.’ His book was the contents of the egg, the cover its shell.
You are, Coryate told Henry, ‘the radiant sun of our English Hemisphere’. You, the ‘great Phoebean lamp’ warms the egg ‘produced by a chuckling hen’, me, Coryate. By ‘your Gracious irradiation’, you make this egg ‘conspicuous and illustrious’, he hoped, fervently.
Coryate’s language played with images, twisting them into wit, making up new words that sailed to the edge of nonsense. ‘A great and bold carpenter of words,’ was how Ben Jonson described him. ‘Yea,’ continued Coryate, ‘I wish that by this auspicious obumbration [shading] of your princely wings, this senseless shell may prove a lively bird … and so breed more birds of the same feather … In the meantime, receive into your indulgent hand … this tender feathered Red-breast.’ With that he handed over Henry’s presentation copy, bound in vibrant red velvet.
‘Let his cage be your Highness’s study, his perch your Princely hand.’ That is, Henry should put the book in a prominent place, where all visitors could see it.
Henry’s volume delivered, Coryate led his donkey to deliver the other advance copies. The king received his at Theobalds, his mansion in Hertfordshire – Coryate greeting his monarch as ‘the refulgent carbuncle of Christendom’. James rolled his eyes: he never understood Henry’s indulgence of ‘that fool’.
The queen, ‘most resplendent gem and radiant Aurora of Great Britain’s spacious hemisphere’, received hers at Greenwich Palace – from me, said Coryate, ‘who am nothing but a foggy vapour and an obscure relic of darkness’. He hoped she would recommend it in England and in Denmark.
Princess Elizabeth was presented with her copy at Lord Harington’s house at Kew, where she was staying. Coryate pressed it into ‘your Grace’s lily white hands … in whose name, sex and heroical disposition methinks I see our great Queen Elizabeth revived and resuscitated back unto life’.
He returned to London and found ten-year-old Prince Charles at St James’s with Henry. Coryate hailed him as the ‘most glittering Chrysolyte of our English diadem, in whose little, yet most lovely gracious, and elegant body do bud most pregnant hopes like fair blossoms of great fortunes and greater virtues’.
It was all very Coryate, very Henry, very Jacobean – and very easy fun, compared with the complexity and seriousness of life outside St James’s, where new problems were presenting themselves.