Sentience Protocol

HUMAN AND ANIMAL RIGHTS THREATENED BY BRITISH MISRULE

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Lady with a Parrot

African Grey Parrot, pet of Frances Teresa Stuart, Duchess of Richmond (1648 - 1702)

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Virgin Huntress

Frances Teresa Stewart as the Goddess Diana, by Lely

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Like a Virgin

Barbara Palmer (née Villiers), Duchess of Cleveland with her son, Charles FitzRoy,
as the Virgin and Child, by Lely

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The Spy Who Lost Her Clothes

THE MASQUE OF QUEENS, A SHIPWRECK
AND A MISSING DRESS

Nothing

Part one of Nothing

Part two of Nothing

Part three of Nothing

End of the fairy tale

 PART SIX of THEATRES OF POWER 1580-1780

There was a torture chamber hidden under the fairytale palaces, the vanishing flower-garlanded places where laughing, well-fed putti eternally play after the people, surfeited on Rococo, have died or fled.

Apollo with the Graces and Muses painted for the ceiling of the Théâtre de la reine, at Trianon,

 Versailles, by Jean-Jacques Lagrenée, 1779. Image source: Wikipedia

The restrained imagery of the later Stuart monarchy reflected the bloodless 1688 revolution in political realities. Baroque was sobered down, mannered. Its architecture was perceived as heavy and florid, and was already going out of fashion by the time its last great palace, Blenheim, was finished in 1716, to complaints from the owner, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, about the impracticalities of the design. The architect, John Vanbrugh, whose other most famous building is the fairy tale Castle Howard, a fantastical stage set on the Yorkshire moors, was....

Absolutism and Revolution

Part Five of THEATRES OF POWER

Engraving by Le Pautre of the performance of Lully's Alceste in the cour de marbre, the first of six fêtes, Les Divertissments de Versailles, held in 1674 to celebrate one of Louis XIV's military conquests. "I have loved war too much", confessed the dying king, forty two years later, when his mania for glory had bankrupted the state.

In the second half of the 17th century, court ballet, inspired by Louis XIV's example, continued to be a ritualized, exquisitely designed declaration of political agenda and ideology, occasions prickling with controversy, just as much as the Jacobean court masques and the dumb-show of Hamlet's play within the play. 

Contemporary princes were expected to use theatrical performance to make a political point, even if by nature they were not talented....

Wedding of the Gods

 PART FOUR of THEATRES OF POWER

Stefano della Bella (1610-1664) Scene Five, "Hell", of a set of stage designs 

for Le Nozze degli Dei, 1637. 

Image copyright The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London

The origins of the theatrical spectaculars of the Baroque and our own time, and of classical ballet and opera, are usually traced by academics to the "magnifences" of Catherine de Medici, who, out of dire political necessity during the Wars of Religion, built on two traditions, the Valois court entertainments and the intermezzi of her own family’s court in Florence, to devise cultural showcases for dynastic policies. 

Dynasty: Catherine de Medici and her husband, Henri II, at the centre of family satellites 

in France and other European states. 

Miniatures by Clouet. Image source: WGA

Two engravings by Jacques Callot in the Courtauld exhibition gave an idea of the ambitious scale of the entertainments laid on by the Medici, including a mock water battle to celebrate the visit of the Prince of Urbino in 1619, which was watched by 30,000 people. In modern terms, these huge events were the equivalent of staging the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, and the intermezzi are comparable to.....

Enchanted Islands

PART THREE of THEATRES OF POWER

 

As proof that Louis XIV’s power was absolute, Nature itself was subservient to him in the water gardens of Versailles. The fountain jets of le bosquet du théâtre d’eau (replaced in the early 1770s by a plain grass covered grove, and recently excavated) were designed, according to the fontaineer Claude Denis, to perform “obeisance to the king of kings”.

 Le théâtre d’eau - vue de la scène, 

one of the views of les bosquets, or groves, of Versailles by Jean Cotelle the younger, 1693. 

Image source: Wikipedia

For over a hundred years, the official pretexts for the exquisite staged illusions in the chateau's grounds were usually celebrations of royal weddings and new-born heirs, as you would expect of a fairy tale, but also, on occasion, the birth of a son to the king's favourite mistress of the moment, and the acquisition of territories through war, ruinously expensive in money and lives. "I have loved war too much", confessed the dying king, forty years later, when he bequeathed toxic, bankrupt splendour to his five year old heir. 

Feu d'artifice: Firework display on the canal at Versailles, one of the divertissements held at Versailles to celebrate the reconquest of Franche-Comté in 1674. On previous days of the festival, Lully's ballet Alceste had been performed in front of the Marble Court and Moliere's Le Malade Imaginaire in front of the Grotto of Thetis. Engraving by Le Pautre, 1676. 

Image © RMN, Musée du Louvre/Photo Thierry de Mage

Advanced technology and artistic talent mythologized life at court, enabling the refulgent monarchy to divert the nobility into acquiescence during peacetime, and dazzle friends and enemies abroad, with ballets, plays, operas, tricks of the eye, dancing fountains, musical gardens and artificial fire. The population excluded from wealth and political power, the artisans and peasants, were invited to marvel at the pleasures of the elite from a safe distance, on the terrace behind the palace or in the branches of the garden trees.

Louis XIV had always intended Versailles should be a theatre...

The ministry of fashion

"Golden lads and girls....must come to dust."

Lord John and Lord Bernard Stuart

Van Dyck, c. 1638. Oil on canvas, National Gallery, London. Image source: WGA

Collateral damage of baroque absolutist illusion.

They were wrong but romantic; collateral damage of absolutism and revolution, teenage brothers, cousins of the king, transformed and immortalized by Van Dyck into an illusory image of English aristocracy that inspired fantasies still enjoyed today, including fictional upper-class heroes like the Scarlet Pimpernel and the 1930s gentleman detective, whose outward foppishness concealed brains and virility, and, more recently, re-invented as the modern meterosexual vampires of film and TV, whose lineage goes back beyond late Victorian Dracula, to Byronic heroes, Restoration libertines and doomed Cavalier youths.

The confident, sensual magnificence of Baroque male fashion boasted feminine attributes; in comparison, the presentation of ideal masculine sexuality of a hundred years earlier - Henry VIII in his straddling stance jutting out his codpiece - looks crudely insecure. 

Even a realistic artist and social observer like Frans

Best Actor Award for Playing the King

CHARLES II'S POLICY OF AMUSEMENT

Everybody acts a part to some degree; for politicians and princes it is part of the job description. The statesman and writer, the Marquess of Halifax (1633 - 95), in A Character of King Charles II called dissembling a Jewel in the Crown and warned: “Princes dissemble with too many, not to have it discovered.” 

Charles II, attended by some of his favourite spaniels, being presented by the Royal Gardener, John Rose, with the first pineapple grown in England, painted by Hendrick Danckerts, c.1675.
Image source: Wikipedia

One of Machiavelli's observations was that princes must act the dual role of lion and fox, and that those who succeed most imitate the fox, which they should conceal by being "a great simulator and dissimulator".

Charles II was as capable and ambitious as his more powerful, and despotic, contemporary, Louis XIV of France. The cousins were both embittered by the humiliating experiences of rebellions in their youth. Though Charles presided over a far more informal court than Versailles, it was still his personality that dominated but through a "careless grandeur" [Aphra Behn] not the ritualized terror of the Sun King.

He kept his real feelings and beliefs, if he had any at all, hidden behind the suave persona that has passed into historical legend, the “witty king Whose word no man relies on” [Rochester]. 

He was "gracious”, “debonair and easy of access”, according to John Evelyn, who, while deploring the king’s easy nature that made him prey to crafty advisors, profuse mistresses and messy spaniels, admired his natural gifts and energy.

Rochester, for all he shared Charles’ sex addiction and moral sceptiscim, was just as frustrated as Evelyn by the waste of potential, the possibility of a glorious reign and a happy people dissipated by indolence and indifference, and the defensive dissembling, “sharpened by misfortunes”[Halifax], that hardened into a habit.   

The weight of expectation at the Restoration, as at the outset of any reign, was unrealistic; Charles, even if he had been a more hard-working and candid king, would have incurred the disappointment of believers, as happened to Obama. 

Charles Stuart was the monarch of a divided nation, of irreconcilable political, moral, religious and racial differences.

The character of King Charles became the prototype for a saturnine romantic fictional hero, the man who would have been an excellent prince but for a fatal flaw; the disillusioned rake with a kind heart; the sybarite who got up early in the morning to play tennis, and who rode his own horse to victory at Newmarket races; the predatory satyr who was a doting father; the cynical politician who trusted nobody and was romantically in love with his sister, Minette; flippant and gracious to the end, apologizing for his unconscionable time dying, solicitous about his most vulnerable mistress's welfare ("don't let poor Nelly starve"), polite to his wife, who of course adored him, hoping, true to the fantasy of women who love philanderers, that deep down, he loved her best. 

And perhaps that is the secret of his charm for all of us: he is one of those historical or fictional figures who seduce our imaginations like intimate friends, giving us the illusion that we know him and would have fun with him. 

Underneath, all he wanted was to survive, and had no scruples how he did so. He had learned by his early twenties that "the use of speech is to conceal the thoughts." [Machiavelli again.] 

He is the only known double agent to have been a reigning king: the anointed Head of the Church of England who safeguarded a Protestant succession after his Roman Catholic  brother, and was always secretly Roman Catholic himself, at last received into the faith while he was dying; his whole personality a self-invented baroque illusion that he controlled so other men would not control him.

He famously enjoyed the public theatre, which flourished under his patronage and that of the literary members of his court, like Rochester and Buckingham, sensual, moral and intellectual nihilists who also understood the power of illusion.

Elizabeth I had turned dissembling and prevaricating in the cause of the Crown into an art form, as much part of the performance of ruling, along with sceptres and orbs, as of statecraft; but she was always loyal to her ministers, and worked with them, even if she did not personally like them, while Charles preferred to play them off against each other and pursue his own secret foreign policy. 

He had no concept of responsibility except for his family and mistresses: he sacrificed two of his most steadfast and competent adherents, Montrose, the heroic general, and Clarendon, the statesman, for political expediency. Infidelity and double-dealing became his reflexes, the vicious feints of his constant charm defensive.

As Rochester complained contemptuously, Charles could not be relied on. Yet even his shrewdest contemporaries critics, like Halifax, and most modern biographers, male and female, were glamoured by him. “The merry monarch, scandalous and poor" was “still the easiest King and best-bred man alive" [Rochester].

 

Halifax was a serious writer, a practical politician and philosopher, not a high-society gossip, who thought that penetrating this king's character would leave an important lesson to posterity. 

At the end of his analysis, Halifax indulgently forgives the King because of the frail humanity that binds us all: "What private man will throw stones at him because he loved? Or what Prince, because he dissembled?" [Halifax: A Character of Charles II].

"Everyone sees what you appear to be,
few experience what you really are"
[Macchiavelli: The Prince]

ESCAPE 

One of the series of unintentionally hilarious paintings of Charles II’s Escape by Isaac Fuller, commissioned after the Restoration to mythologize the true story of the king’s humility among the loyal common people who helped him when, disguised as a woodcutter, he was a fugitive after the Royalist defeat at Worcester in 1651. Charles’ familiar saturnine features are portrayed as they looked in his 30s, not as the 21 year old youth he had been at the time of his greatest danger. [Image source: Wikipedia]

Charles was a talented raconteur who fell into the habit of repeating the story of his escape too often at court to anyone who would listen, which does not preclude the profundity with which he felt his debt, personal and regal, to the courage and selflessness of his supporters, mostly Catholic recusants, excluded from privilege and power, who saved his life. He was a pro-European cosmopolitan who understood his country and its people. He appreciated the best of the British national character and knew the country's interests were inextricably linked to Europe.

On the same theme

ACTING THE KING

THEATRES OF POWER:
ILLUSION IN THE AGE OF BAROQUE

STAGE-STRUCK 

For a professional historian's less infatuated appraisal, readRonald Hutton on CHARLES II