But Charles and Henrietta were not just buyers of pictures and makers of gardens. They wanted to be great patrons, like the Medici. One of the first seriously talented artists that Charles managed to lure to England was Orazio Gentileschi, now best-known as the father of Caravaggio’s most brilliant follower, Artemisia Gentileschi. Orazio arrived in England in October 1626, perhaps as part of the entourage of Henrietta’s favourite Bassompierre. He came to England directly from the court of Marie de Medici. Orazio was so much Henrietta’s painter that he was buried beneath the floor of her chapel at Somerset House when he died, an entitlement extended to all the queen’s Catholic servants. She may have liked him because, like her beloved husband, he always wore the sober, elegant black of the melancholy intellectual. He was also small and slight, like Charles.
His greatest commission was probably Henrietta’s own idea; nine huge panels for the ceiling of the Queen’s House at Greenwich. Greenwich itself, referred to as ‘some curious device of Inigo Jones’s’, was also called ‘the House of Delight’. The house was elegant, smooth, very feminine – seventeenth-century minimalism, but with curves, with grace. The paintings added colour and fire. The white-and-gold ceiling was augmented with the brilliant colours of a sequence that was to be called Allegory of Peace and the Arts under an English Crown. The so-called tulip staircase is a misnomer, but a felicitous one, since it conveys the long elegant lines of the curling flights. And like the tulip craze, the palace’s glory was short-lived, for its mistress did not enjoy it for long. Its post-war fate was to become a prison for Dutch seamen, a victim of Parliament’s iconoclasm.
In the seventeenth century, artists often worked with family members; in acquiring Orazio’s services, Charles and Henrietta also gained those of his brilliant daughter. Artemisia almost certainly helped her father with the sequence, while the plague raged through London and the armies gathered reluctantly for the Bishops’ Wars. Orazio’s two sons played a crucial role in Charles’s activities as a collector, going to the Continent to advise King’s Musician Nicholas Lanier when he was negotiating to buy the Duke of Mantua’s collection, the biggest single picture purchase by an English sovereign. Lanier also bought Caravaggio’s astounding and magnificent Death of the Virgin for Charles secretly in Venice. And the melancholy, artistic Richard Symonds suggests a closer relationship between these two exceptionally talented royal servants; in describing Lanier, Symonds calls him ‘inamorato di Artemisia Gentileschi: che pingera bene’ (lover of Artemisia Gentileschi, that good painter) while Theodore Turquet de Megerne says Nicholas Lanier knew artistic techniques that were Gentileschi family secrets; they could have met in Rome or Venice, via Artemisia’s brothers. If so, this was an affair between two of the most talented people at Charles and Henrietta’s court. However the country felt about them, the king and queen had created a world in which such talent could flourish, and find an echo in the mind of another.
And the royal couple could be influenced by this cultural world of their own making. Artemisia says something in one of her letters that is very reminiscent of remarks Henrietta makes about herself during the war: ‘You will find that I have the soul of Caesar in a woman’s heart’ (13 November 1649). Henrietta was to call herself a she-generalissima in similar fashion.
Other schemes came to nothing. Henrietta had ordered a Bacchus and Ariadne from one of her favourite artists, Guido Reni of Bologna, whose Labours of Hercules was one of the paintings Charles had acquired from the Duke of Mantua. It was never sent to London because Cardinal Barberini thought it too lascivious. A cut-price deal was done to ornament the withdrawing room with twenty-two paintings by Jacob Jordaens, a pupil of Rubens, bound to charge much less than the master himself. Balthasar Gerbier tried to get the job for Rubens, promising that the master would not seek to represent drunken-headed imaginary gods, but that he was ‘the gentlest in his representations’. Nonetheless, the royal couple chose the cheaper pupil, with instructions not to tell Jordaens who the clients were, in case he raised his price. He was also firmly told to make his women ‘as beautiful as may be, the figures gracious and svelte’. Gerbier kept on pushing to get the commission for Rubens, but on 23 May, he had to report the failure of his hopes with Rubens’ death. Eight of Jordaens’s paintings were duly executed; like many another artist in the service of Charles and Henrietta, he saw only a small portion of his promised fee, £100 of £680.
The might of the court, its self-absorption and glory, is best glimpsed in the way it displayed its own world to itself. The court masque was like a mirror, gleaming, shining. It was also like an insanely elaborate production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at a well-endowed school; big sets, but amateur actors.
Shrovetide 1630 was a festivity from the seventh Sunday before Easter till the following Tuesday (now called Shrove or Pancake Tuesday). The idea was to eat up all the meat, eggs, cheese and other foods forbidden in Lent. But Shrove also meant shriving or confession of sins, and the gift of absolution from them. The godly didn’t like it much; it was ‘a day of great gluttony, surfeiting and drunkenness’, thought one godly minister, and it was also a day for football and cockfights. In choosing it for her first big masque, called Chloridia, and telling the story depicted in Botticelli’s Primavera, Henrietta was trying to tame festivity, to make it her own, and to combine fun with the shriving of sin, with redemption. The masque’s preface recorded the splendour of the event:
The celebration of some Rites, done to the Goddess Chloris, who in a general counsel of the Gods, was proclaimed Goddess of the flowers, according to that of Ovid, in the Fasti. The Curtain being drawn up, the Scene is discovered, consisting of pleasant hills, planted with young trees, and all the lower banks adorned with flowers. And from some hollow parts of those Hills, Fountains come gliding down, which, in the far-off Landshape, seemed all to be converted to a River. Over all, a serene sky, with transparent cloudes, giving a great lustre to the whole work, which did imitate the pleasant Spring. When the spectators had enough fed their eyes, with the delights of the Scene, in a part of the air, a bright Cloud begins to break forth; and in it is sitting a plump Boy, in a changeable garment, richly adorned, representing the mild Zephyrus. On the other side of the Scene, in a purplish Cloud, appeareth the Spring, a beautiful Maid, her upper garment green, under it, a white robe wrought with flowers.
The resemblance to a mythological painting by an Italian or Flemish master is clear. Inigo Jones, the creator of its visual aspects, carefully borrowed books about continental wedding pageants from the Cotton library. He suggested a costume for Henrietta herself, ‘several fresh greens mixed with gold and silver will be most proper’. This was Ben Jonson’s last court masque, and he made the most of it. Attendance was by invitation, and those not among the called and chosen had little hope of getting in; boxes were overflowing with richly dressed ladies as it was. They wore shockingly low-cut dresses, too, thought the Venetian embassy chaplain: ‘those who are plump and buxom show their bosoms very openly, and the lean go muffled to the throat’. There were feathers, and jewels, and brightly coloured dresses. One of the scantily-clad dancers was Lucy Hay. The masque began at about 6 p.m., and afterwards the king attended a special buffet supper for the cast. At the end of the evening the supper table would be ceremoniously overthrown amidst the sound of breaking glass, so dear to the upper classes, as a kind of violent variant of James Hay’s double feasts.
Charles and Henrietta were good at the visual, and they also had in Nicholas Lanier a fine musician. Their pet poets were less distinguished. Here is William Davenant: ‘How had you walked in mists of sea-coal smoke,/ Such as your ever-teeming wives would choke/ (False sons of thrift!) did not her beauteous light/ Dispel your clouds and quicken your dull sight?’
Shakespeare it isn’t, but it is fascinating testimony