New Poems by James I/Arrival in England: Patronage of Prose and the Drama

by James I

V

ARRIVAL IN ENGLAND: PATRONAGE OF PROSE
AND THE DRAMA

"The very poets with their idle pamphlets, promise themselves large part in his favour."

James's reputation as a poet and patron reached England long before his accession to the throne, and heightened the chorus of welcome on his actual arrival. Sidney's mention of "King James of Scotland"^[1] as patron of poetry undoubtedly refers to the author of The Kingis Quair, though if the Apology were written as late as 1583 Sidney must have been aware of the younger Stuart's scholarly accomplishments. Ten years later both of James's early volumes of verse were evidently familiar to Harvey, who devotes a paragraph of Pierce's Supererogation to euphuistic praise of Du Bartas and the King — "the woorthy Prince that is a Homer to himselfe, a Golden spurre to Nobility, a Scepter to Vertue, a verdure to the Spring, a Sunne to the day, and hath not onely translated the two diuine Poems of Salustius du Bartas, his Heavenly Vrany, and his hellish Furies, but hath readd a most valorous Martial Lecture unto himself in his owne victorious Lepanto, a short, but heroicall worke, in meeter, but royall meeter, fitt for a Dauids harpe."^[2] Barnfield, in 1598, makes the King's love of poetry the point of the second sonnet at the opening of his Poems: in divers Humors:^[3]—

"And you, that discommend sweet Poesie,
(So that the Subject of the same be good)

Here may you see, your fond simplicitie,
Sith Kings have favored it, of royal Blood.
The King of Scots (now living) is a Poet
As his Lepanto and his Furies show it."

Meres, in Palladis Tamia (1598), quotes the last two lines of Barnfield,^[4] while Vaughan in The Golden Grove (1600) writes that "James . . . is a notable Poet, and daily setteth out most learned poems, to the admiration of all his subjects."^[5]

In Allott's England's Parnassus (1600),^[6] there are ten quotations from James, nine from the Uranie and one from the Phœnix, amounting in all to about seventy lines. Bodenham in his account of the contributors to Belvedére, or The Garden of the Muses,^[7] published in the same year, gives to James a place of honor. He has drawn, he writes, first from the triumphs, tiltings, and similar laudatory verses dedicated to Elizabeth; and next from "what workes of Poetrie have been put to the world's eye by that learned and right royall king and Poet, James King of Scotland, no one sentence of worth hath escaped. . . ." The number of lines which passed this test are not easily discovered in the olla-podrida of Bodenham's collection.

It was thus with a well- justified hope "of a more regard to the present condition of our writings, in respect of our soveraignes happy inclination this way,"^[8] that poets good, bad and indifferent lifted up their voices in mingled grief and rejoicing at the change of rulers. Innumerable were the "Sorrowes Joyes" and "Mournefull Ditties to a pleasant newe Note" which met the King on his leisurely progress into England. Daniel, Drayton, T. Greene the actor, the two Fletchers of Cambridge in the poems issued by the University, Chettle the playwright, were among the more conspicuous who thus mingled dirge and panegyric. 1 To gratify fully the hopes of these poets, the royal revenues must needs have exceeded the bounds of their imaginations. But there is good evidence that James, with his characteristic recklessness in money matters, and after the 'patterns of vertuous princes' he had studied in childhood, seriously intended to take the arts and letters under his protection.

In this respect it was not difficult for him to surpass the generosity of his predecessor, regarding whom the best Vaughan can say is that she made a certain Dr. Haddon master of requests. 2 Indeed, though the Queen's person and career stirred her subjects to high poetical enthusiasm, there is little to show that she was particularly interested in literature or extended assistance of a more practical sort. Patronage during her reign came chiefly from gentlemen of culture such as Sidney and Essex, and from noble ladies such as Sidney's sister the Countess of Pembroke, the Countess of Cumberland and her mother, and the Countess of Bedford. 3

Under James, this private encouragement was supple- mented and in some measure supplanted by the direct sup- port of the royal family. This maybe accounted for not only by the royal monopoly of dramatic patronage, but also by the King's personal interest in poetry and prose controversy, Shakspere's position as chief dramatist of the King's com- pany of actors, Bacon's political promotion, Donne's pre- ferment in the church by the King's influence, and Jonson's services as composer of masques illustrate, not so much the rewards extended for literary accomplishment, as the relations with the court of the chief literary figures of the period.

The general question of court patronage of the drama in the reign of James is much too complicated for brief or sub-

1 For poems on the accession, cf. Nichols, Progresses of King James, Vol. I, pp. x-xxxvii.

2 Elizabethan Critical Essays, Vol. II, p. 325.

3 Cf. Miss Ph. Sheavyn, Patrons and Professional Writers under Elizabeth and James I. In discussing the incomes of writers, Miss Sheavyn makes but slight reference to gifts and pensions from the crown. ordinated treatment, and has been left outside the scope of the present study. Attention may be called merely to the King's early interest in entertainments of this character, an interest which may explain the pleasure which in later years he is known to have taken in all forms of drama and theatrical spectacle. The evidence on this point is furnished in part by the masque or Epithalamion (IIV) which he himself contrived in 1588 for the marriage of his ward, the daughter of Lennox, and the Earl of Huntly. Save as the sole extant example of its type in Scottish literature, the piece is in no way remarkable, and mingles disguise, dialogue, spectacle, comic byplay (at least suggested by the presence of the zany or clown), and classical mythology after the usual formula of French Hymenée and English maskings at feasts and royal progresses. Though there is no indication of dancing, the component elements are otherwise much the same as those of the more elaborate shows of Jonson and Inigo Jones, at which it is only fair to suppose the King an appreciative spectator, capable of enjoying not merely the fantastic erudition of the pieces, but also their finer artistic and poetic qualities.^[9]

James had a hand also, with his friend William Fowler, in the games and shows at the christening of Prince Henry, August 23, 1594. The entertainment at the banquet following the ceremony, according to Fowler,^[10] was intended by the King as an allegory representing the favor shown him by the gods during his voyage to Denmark and in the happy issue of his marriage. Its chief property consisted of a movable ship, eighteen feet long, eight feet wide, and four feet high, which was elaborately decorated with sails of taffeta, ordnance, and rigging, and manned by Arion with his harp, Neptune, Thetis, and Triton, three sirens, six sailors, and fourteen musicians. The vessel approached the table, delivered the banquet, and departed at the close after the singing of the One Hundred Twenty-eighth Psalm. The whole entertainment, of which this was merely a part, and which extended over several days, illustrates the pleasure taken by the royal couple in gorgeous and costly spectacle.

These, however, were but the pastimes of idle moments. Of a much more serious character was the King's interest in the disputes of scholars over problems in theology and in what was at the time the closely allied subject of the theory of government. From his childhood his studies had been especially in these fields; as the French Ambassador, Boderie, remarks, theology was the subject which he knew best, and in the discussion of which he took the greatest pleasure.^[11] The sermons and paraphrases in the stirring years of Spanish preparations against England have already been mentioned.^[12] The Dæmonologie, a dialogue on witchcraft, directed especially against the damnable scepticism of Reginald Scott and the German physician Weirus, appeared in 1597; The Trewe Lawe of free [i.e. absolute] Monarchies,^[13] in answer to the arguments of Buchanan, Hotman, Hubert Languet, and similar reformers, in 1598; and the Basilikon Doron, altogether the most original and pleasing of the King's writings, early in 1599.^[14] The curiosity aroused by James's accession to the English throne led to the republication of all of these in or about the year 1603, and the translation of the more important into Latin, French, and other languages.

After a short interval, the King was again stirred to controversy by Catholic opposition to the Oath of Allegiance (1606), following the Gunpowder Plot, which required Catholic Englishmen to deny the temporal supremacy of the Pope. An Apologie For The Oath of Allegiance, which appeared late in 1607,^[15] was the King's defense of this requirement, in reply especially to two breves from the Pope to English Catholics and Cardinal Bellarmine's published letter to the Archpriest George Blackwell.^[16] The Apologie was re-issued in May, 1609,^[17] with formal admission of the royal authorship and an extended Premonition To All Most Mightie Monarches, Kings, Free Princes, and States of Christendome, defending the Apologie against its critics. In the meantime a veritable battle of the books had ensued, in which continental theologians found a target for their pamphlets in the prominence of their royal opponent. Before 1615 at least thirty-six distinct works appeared on one side or the other, and a complete list of translations, re-issues, and skirmishes on the borders of the main engagement would number many more.^[18] Among the more important English writers who came to the King's defense were Launcelot Andrewes, Bishop of Chichester, William Barlow, Bishop of Lincoln, William Tooker, Dean of Lichfield, John Donne the poet, John Barclay, and Samuel Collins, Regius Professor at Cambridge. "On y travaille," writes Boderie of the Premonition, "et il y a une petite congrégation de gens doctes qui tous les jours s'assemblent devant le dit Roi, pou revoir et corriger les traductions qui en ont été faites."^[19] Their method evidently was the same as that employed by the contemporary translators of the Bible. In 1612, the King gave a new turn to the discussion by the publication of A Declaration concerning the Proceedings with the States Generall, of the United Provinces of the Low Countreys, in the cause of D. Conradus Vorstius, an attack on the Dutch professor for his Arminian disbelief in the limited essence and complete foreknowledge of God. The main question was again taken up, however, in A Remonstrance for the Right of Kings, and the Independance of their Crownes, against an Oration of the Most Illustrious Card. of Perron, pronounced in the Chamber of the third Estate, Jan. 75, 1615. In the next year, all of these prose pieces, with six of the King's addresses in Parliament, were gathered together in chronological order in a single folio volume.

The almost complete oblivion of these tracts, in modern times, obscures somewhat their importance in the age when they were written. They were the defense of the established monarchical form of government, on the one hand against the Puritans who in Scotland and later in England sought to set up a religious commonwealth like that of Calvin at Geneva, and on the other hand against the pretensions of the Pope to temporal power. Like Hooker in the reign of Elizabeth, James bent his energies to meet these attacks; and however extreme his position, it was fundamentally in accord with what has remained the traditional English attitude. The theory of the divine right of kings was now first fully formulated; fantastic as it may seem to-day, it was the result merely of an effort to find for monarchy the same sanction as that asserted by its opponents, and the only one they were disposed to accept. Needless to say, if James could have conducted his government as skilfully as his arguments, such defense might not have been necessary.

In the partial list, already given, of writers whom religious zeal or desire for royal favor drew into this ink and paper warfare, the names of Donne and Barclay^[20] are the only ones of much note in literature. For the latter's stay in England, and his services as the King's literary assistant and companion in scholarship, his biographers have hitherto depended largely on the references in his own writings and those of his friend Casaubon; but these may easily be supplemented by the records, in part given in the calendars of state papers, of the place and pension which he received for his reward. Barclay's father was a Scottish Catholic who in the reign of Mary had settled at Pont-á-Mousson as professor of law in a Jesuit college, and who as a Catholic had attracted attention in 1600 by a treatise defending the rights of kings against the Pope.^[21] Father and son paid a short visit to England in 1603, and in 1606 the son was again in London, seeking patronage in the usual fashion by the composition of adulatory verses in Latin.^[22] His first recorded recompense was ₤100, paid by Cecil, October 26, 1607,^[23] and in the following June he was granted an annuity of ₤250.^[24]

The date of his second departure from England and the nature of his mission abroad may be derived from a letter of Boderie, June 24, 1609, to the effect that Barclay had been appointed to carry the Premonition to the Emperor of Germany, the King of Hungary, and the Dukes of Bavaria, Lorraine, and Savoy. 1 For this journey a payment had already been made, May 29, "unto his Ma ties servants [John] Barclay and Robert Aytoun [the poet] gents, and of the Grooms of the Privy Chamber the sum of 300 li. to each of them, for their charge and expense, being sent unto divers forraine Princes with His M s L'res"; 2 and in No- vember Barclay obtained 200 in addition. 3 Later grants and gifts 4 may be recorded briefly as follows : January, 1610, pension of 200, on surrender of his former pension of 250 3 ; February, 1611, pension of 60 to Anne de Mala- ville, wife of William Barclay; 2 July, 1611, free gift of ioo 3 ; March, 1614, pension of 200 to Louise Barclay, wife of John Barclay; 2 August, 1615, "to John Barklay, Esq., the sum of 250 li. of his Ma ties free gift, in considera- tion of his services." 2 At the time of this last payment, Barclay seems to have been making preparations for his final change of residence to Rome, where he spent the last years of his life, for in this year he gathered together a second volume of poems, and there is a record of a transfer to a financial agent named Burlamachi of all three of the pensions which had been granted to him and his family. 5

In return for these rewards, Barclay assisted the King in translation 6 and in search for authorities, 7 published his

1 Ambassades, Vol. IV, p. 376. z Signet Office Docquets.

3 Cal. S. P. Dom.

4 September 2, 1610, he was seeking the grant of an escheat which had been promised him by the King; and December 21, 1611, he wrote Cecil from Paris for the payment of his pension. Cal. S. P. Dom.

8 September, 1615, "An annuity of 260 li. for Phillip Burlamacni during his life upon surrender of two several annuities, one of 200 li. granted to John Barclay, gent, stranger, and the other of 60 li. granted to Anne de Mala- ville widow of a William Barclay during her life. And also the grant of one other annuity of 200 li. . . . upon surrender of the like annuity granted to Louise Barclay, wife of John Barclay, after the disease of her said husband." —Docquets.

6 " Sir Henry Seville is appointed to correct the translation of the King's book, which was first done by Davies, then by Lionel Sharpe, by Wilson, and last by Barclay the French poet." Chamberlaine to Carleton, April 27, 1609, Cal. S. P. Dom.

7 In the Bodl. MS. of the Premonition there is a note in the King's hand, "to remember to speak with barclaye." Lusus Regius, p. x. father's De Potestate Papæ (1609), answered the critics of this work in his Pietas (1612), and served especially as a companion for the King in the learned discussions in which he delighted. "Ad Regem hodie Genovicum profectus," writes Casaubon, June, 1614, "cum eruditissimo et amicissimo Barclaio diem suavissime consumpsi." 1 Casaubon was fond of such kindly superlatives, but there is evidence that even he at times grew weary of the continued attendance which James was pleased to require.

Walton, in his life of Donne, gives an account of the similar manner in which the English poet gained a standing at court: "The King had formerly both known and put a value upon his company, and had also given him some hopes of a state-employment; being always much pleased when Mr. Donne attended him, especially at his meals, where there were usually many deep discourses of general learning and very often friendly disputes, or debates of religion betwixt his Majesty and those divines whose places required their attendance on him. 2 According to Mr. Gosse, 3 though this pleasant story is doubtless true of a later period, there is no evidence of talk at meals or other intercourse between Donne and James prior to 1614, save on one occasion in 1609 again recorded by Walton when the King commanded the composition of the Pseudo-Martyr. It is indeed true that such court favor as the poet had, assisted him little in his futile efforts during the years 1607-1610 for such posts as Sir William Fowler's office of secretary

1 Ephemerides, ed. Russell, p. 1062. Casaubon came to England early in 1611, and remained as the King's pensioner until his death in 1614. His opinions of his patron in his diary and private letters are uniformly favorable. He found him "greater than report, and thought him more so every time he saw him." — Ephem. "I enjoy the favor of this excellent monarch, who is really more instructed than most people give him credit for. He is a lover of learning to a degree beyond belief; his judgement of books, old and new, is such as would become a professed scholar rather than a mighty prince." Letter to the historian De Thou. (The passages are quoted and translated in Pattison, Isaac Casaubon, ed. 1892, pp. 695, 285.)

2 Life of Donne, Library of English Classics, p. 207.

3 The Life and Letters of John Donne, London, 1899, Vol. II, p. 58. to the Queen,^[25] a secretaryship in Ireland, and the place George Sandys later occupied as secretary in Virginia. Yet, even in this earlier period, it is inconceivable that James, who was on the lookout for clever young scholars and waverers from Catholicism, was not aware of Donne's gifts and search for preferment. Thomas Morton, whom Donne had assisted in controversy, was in 1607 one of the King's chaplains-in-ordinary ; Sir Henry Goodyer, to whom the poet for years sent weekly letters, was of the privy chamber; Sir Robert Ker, another friend, was in the Prince's household. If the Pseudo-Martyr was not written at the King's command — and of course such authority would not in any case be spoken of in the book itself — it was at least dedicated to the King and written chiefly to win his regard. When, in November, 1614, the poet's claims were finally presented definitely to James, he evidently had already formed an opinion of Donne's gifts and a plan for his career: "I know Mr. Donne is a learned man, has the abilities of a learned Divine, and will prove a powerful preacher; and my desire is to prefer him that way, and in that way I will deny you nothing for him."^[26] The idea of entering the church had been in Donne's mind at least two or three years earlier; and if, as he used to say later, the King "first inclined him to be a minister," there may possibly have been some previous offer, hindered, as Mr. Gosse would suggest, by the poet's hesitation on points of doctrine.

Walton states that soon after his entering the church Donne became one of the King's chaplains; he at least preached frequently at court and pleased the King greatly by his sermons. "A piece of such perfection as could admit neither addition nor diminution," James is said to have remarked of the Instructions to Preachers, printed at his desire in 1622.^[27] Donne's paraphrase of the five opening chapters of the Lamentations of Jeremiah belongs to an unfortunate type of poetry, the fashion of which was encouraged by the example of the King ; and it may not be rash to suggest that the smoother rhythm which Mr. Gosse notes in his poems after 1615, — the "abandonment of the harsh and eccentric inversions of his earlier manner, so marked as to be in itself an indication of the period when a poem was composed,"^[28] — was in some degree a concession to the orthodox taste of his friends at court and his royal master.

1. Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Gregory Smith, Vol. I, p. 193. For Sidney's intercourse with James, cf. XXX, note.
2. Ibid., Vol. II, p. 265.
3. Roxburghe Club ed., p. 181.
4. Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Smith, Vol. II, p. 321.
5. Ibid., p. 326.
6. Collier's Poetical Miscellanies, Vol. VI ; and on the authorship of quotations, cf. Crawfurd, Notes and Queries, Ser. X, Vol. X, p. 262.
7. Spenser Society reprint, London, 1875.
8. From the prefatory note of Daniel's Defence of Ryme (1603).
9. There is thus no reason for accepting Brotanek's suggestion that the popularity of the masque in the English court was due chiefly to the influence of Queen Anne, or that it was unknown in England prior to her arrival. (Die Englische Maskenspiele, Wiener Beiträge, 1902, p. 279.)
10. A True Accompt . . . of the baptism of . . . Prince Henry, Edinburgh, 1594 (?). Printed, from the London edition of 1603, in Nichols, Progresses of Eliz., Vol. Ill, pp. 353-369. At a second banquet a chariot was employed, on which was a table surrounded by six ladies, Ceres, Faith, Fecundity, Concord, Liberty, and Perseverance. It was to have been drawn in by a tame lion (who figures in the treasurer's accounts of the time), but this experiment was abandoned "lest his presence might have brought some fear to the nearest." Malone has connected this with the lion in Midsummer Night's Dream (c. 1594), whose roaring "might fright the duchess and the ladies." The existence of a 1594 edition of the Accompt, of which Malone was unaware, makes his suggestion not unlikely.
11. Ambassades, ed. 1750, Vol. III, p. 190.
12. Cf. p. xxxiv.
13. "The bent of it was directed against the course of God's worke in our Kirk and ellis where, as rebellious to Kings." Calderwood, Historie of the Kirk of Scotland, Vol. V, p. 727.
14. The first edition was limited to seven copies. Nicholson refers to the treatise in a letter written in October, 1598 (Cal. S. P. Sco., p. 759).
15. "Il se trouvera du bien et du mal . . . le style en est vehement et temoigne de la passion." Boderie, Vol. II, p. 105 (December, 1607).
16. Cf. W. H. Frere, A History of the English Church in the Reigns of Elizabeth and James I, London, 1904, pp. 337 ff.
17. Hist. MSS. Comm. Reports, IV, p. 343. Letter written by W. Johnson, May 24, 1609, sending a book "lately set forth by the King, presently called in again, and now newly set forth . . . out of the press but yesterday."
18. A list, by no means complete, is given by Birch in an appendix to the 1772 edition of Harris's Life and Writings of James I. For a more extended account of the King's part in the controversy, cf. Irving, Lives of the Scotish Poets, Vol. II, pp. 232-251.
19. Ambassades, Vol. IV, p. 323 (May 14, 1609).
20. John Barclay (1582-1621) is remembered chiefly as the author of Euphormionis Satyricon (1603), one of the first examples of picaresque fiction outside of Spain, and of Argenis (1621), a widely read ideal romance in Latin, with allusions to contemporary courts and politics. Cf . Cam. Hist, of Eng. Lit., Vol. IV, Chap, xiii, and references there cited.
21. De Regno el regali potestate, adversos Buchanum, Brutum, et Boucherium, et reliquos Monarchomachos, Paris, 1600.
22. His poems entitled Sylvæ (London, 1606) are dedicated to Christian IV of Denmark, who visited England in July of that year. They contain verses to James, on the rumor of his death (March 24, 1606), and to Prince Henry, Cecil, Lennox, and Hay.
23. Cal. S. P. Dom.
24. "An annuity of 250 li. per anno for John Barklay gent, stranger, for terme of his lyfe, to beginne from our Lady day last past."—Signet Office Docquets, Public Records Office. (References to the original documents indicate that the payments do not appear in the calendars.)
25. Ibid., Vol. I, p. 156. Mr. Gosse here suggests that Donne was seeking merely some employment under Fowler; but that his aim was the secretaryship itself is shown by a reference in a letter to Goodyer in 1611: "And for a token of my desire to serve him, present Mr. Fowler with three or four thousand pounds of this, since he was so resolved never to leave his place without a suit of like value." — Ibid., Vol. I, p. 240.
26. Walton, Life of Donne, p. 208.
27. Gosse, Life and Letters of John Donne, Vol. II, p. 161.
28. Ibid., Vol. II, p. 76.