I

1The English social anthropologist Ernest Gellner once wrote in an essay on historical methodology: "Perhaps (...) there is agreement to this extent: (human) history is about chaps – and nothing else. But perhaps this should be written: History is about chaps. It does not follow that its explanations are always in terms of chaps. Societies are what people do, but social scientists are not biographers en grande serie"1.

2When making this statement, Gellner was not addressing the specific problems of historical prosopography, but undoubtedly historians using prosopographical methods are to some extent biographers en grande série who try to advance explanations in terms of chaps. Gellner’s statement may therefore serve to remind us of the necessity of examining the methodological foundations of research based on collective biographies.

3In this paper these issues will be discussed with reference to the early Stuart court or more specifically to the court of Charles I. I shall address three points .

4First, defining the court and its membership as a problem of prosopographical research.

5Secondly, the structure of court politics and court factions

6Thirdly, the suitability of the court as a subject for prosopographical

7research.

8The following remarks can only be preliminary, because nobody has so far undertaken a comprehensive prosopographical study of the Caroline Court. Indeed, the best starting point is probably to ask, why no such study exists, whereas other institutions are much better served We have an excellent book on the administrative machinery of England under Charles I, based on biographical information about a representative percentage of royal officeholders, Gerald Aylmer’s The King’s Servants2. Aylmer has in fact analysed not only the departments of state but also the royal household, at least in so far as it consisted of salaried officeholders. Unfortunately, however, the court cannot be identified with the household. Royal officials are not the only group to have become the subject of prosopographical research for the first half of the 17th century. The Royalist officer corps during the Civil War and the Members of the Long Parliament in the 1640s have been similarly analysed; Lawrence Stone’s Crisis of the Aristocracy is to some extent a prosopographical study; and work on the Members of the House of Commons in the period 1603 to 1640 is in progress3.

9Thus the attention of historians has been concentrated on institutions and social groups whose membership can be clearly defined. The court, unfortunately, is not such an institution. Indeed, one could ask whether the court (la cour) as opposed to the household (la maison du roi) is an institution at all. With respect to the late Middle Ages, one historian, Ralph Griffiths, has recently called the court a "mere senes of occasions", that is a series of public ceremonies, audiences, tournaments and so on4. It would probably be going too far to argue on the basis of this observation that the early modem court was a mere event, not an institution5. It remains, however, true that in terms of personnel and membership the court is a rather elusive phenomenon.

II

10Perhaps the best preliminary definition of the court is that it comprised the personal entourage of the monarch, that is, the group of people who had access to the ruler on a more or less regular basis. This implies that those departments of the household which were directly attached to the person of the monarch – in early-17th-century England the Chamber and more specifically the Bedchamber – formed the core of the court. Nevertheless, this core was always surrounded by a wider social circle which was made up of individuals who did not hold any offices in the household6.

11The best description of such courtiers is probably that they lived about the Court but not in it, nor by it – this it the way Clarendon describes the position of one such courtier, the 3rd Earl of Pembroke, during the first years of James I’s reign7. Pembroke later became Lord Chamberlain and later still Lord Steward, but as a young man he held no office in the household. Nevertheless, he undoubtedly did belong in some way to the court. Pembroke’s status as a peer gave him the right to approach the King on occasions when he remained inaccessible to persons of lesser rank Even during the reign of Charles I, who was more reclusive than his father, peers retained the right to enter some rooms of the Privy Lodgings, that is those apartments in the Palace of Whitehall where the monarch actually lived8.

12People who were neither peers nor officeholders in the household were not necessarily excluded from the inner confines of the court, but they were certainly in a less favourable position. It seems, however, that at least some individuals obtained the right of access to the Privy Lodgings once they had been officially introduced at court. We have a good example of the rules regulating access to the King and Queen during the early Stuart period dating from the years immediately preceding the Civil War. In 1641 Sir John Temple was active at court on behalf of the Earl of Leicester in connection with the latter’s efforts to gain an office, preferably the Lord Deputyship of Ireland or a Secretaryship of State. In March 1641 Temple reported to Leicester that he hoped to be able to further his cause more effectively in the immediate future, for on the next day he was to be introduced to the Queen and would kiss hands. This would give him the right to enter the Queen’s withdrawing room where her courtiers met without any further formalities9. In other words: The ceremony of kissing hands made Temple in some ways a member of the Queen’s entourage although he held no office at court.

13The examples of Temple and Pembroke are important because the court is often identified with the royal household, or with certain particular household departments. If an analysis of the court is based on such a narrow definition it becomes all too easy to construct an insurmountable antagonism between Court and Country. What needs to be emphasized here is that outside the inner departments of the household there was always a wider circle of courtiers which formed a link between Court and Country. Unfortunately it is extremely difficult to identify the members of this wider circle, in other words, those who lived "about the court but not in it or by it". There are, however, some occasions, on which a clearer picture does emerge.

14In the life of the early Stuart court the performance of a masque, that is of a musical drama in which the King or/and Queen danced together with their courtiers is one such occasion10.

15The names of the dancers and actors have been preserved for many of the masques of the 1630s. If we analyse these cast lists, we gain some impression of the composition of the social circle that constituted the court in the wider sense. Between 1630 and 1640, twenty eight peers or eldest sons of peers danced in masques performed at court. Admittedly a majority of these did hold office in the household or in the central administration, or were former officeholders or at least members of an officeholder’s family, that is, his son or son-in-law11. But there were eleven peers or peers’ heirs who had no such immediate connection with the royal household at the time of their first appearance in a masque at court12 .

16Prima facie this may not be a particularly impressive figure, but it is nevertheless surprising to find that a certain number of those who were apparently not reluctant to take part in the social life of the court during the 1630s belonged to aristocratic circles which were clearly opposed to Charles I’s policies at the end of the 1630s. Lords Paget and Wharton, for example, who participated in masques on a regular basis, both signed the famous petition of 1640 presented to the King, by twelve peers who wanted to persuade the King to recall parliament13. Lord Russell, an equally frequent dancer in court masques was the eldest son of the Earl of Bedford who also signed the 1640 petition and played a prominent art in bringing about the downfall of the King’s Personal Rule in 1640-4114 . Finally, Lord Rich, who took part in the performance of Thomas Carew’s Coelum Britannicum in 1634 was the Earl of Warwick’s heir. Warwick’s political convictions were similar to Bedford’s, and possibly even more radical15.

17The cast lists of court masques performed during the 1630s provide some evidence that the social world of the court remained open to those outside the royal household, even if they did not sympathize with the King’s policies. This impression is confirmed by other sources: the notebooks of Sir John Finet, the royal Master of Ceremonies, for example, contain the names of the noblemen entrusted by the King with the task of conducting foreign ambassadors when they first arrived at court, or when they were received by the King in a formal audience. Between 1629 and 1640, 17 peers or their eldest sons who did not personally hold any office in the royal household or the central administration were asked by Charles I at least twice to meet foreign ambassadors and accompany them to an audience16 . These 17 peers include a number who are known to have been opposed to at least some of the policies of the Personal Rule, such as ship money or Charles’s attempts to reform the Church of England on anti-Calvinist lines. This holds true, for example, for the Earl of Warwick, who was asked to meet the French ambassador in 1634 on behalf of the King, and who accompanied the Prince Elector Palatine from Greenwich to Dover when he left England, in 163717. Other noblemen who took a leading part in bringing about the downfall of Charles I’s Personal Rule at the end of the 1630s were present on similar occasions – for example the Earls of Bedford and Rutland, and Lord Paget, whom we have already met as a regular performer in court masques18.

18Although the evidence provided by lists of dancers in masques and of peers performing ceremonial functions at court would have to be supplemented by further material in order to complete the picture, I think we are justified in assuming that during the 1630s the court as a social circle remained open to non-officeholders regardless of their political convictions, provided their social status was sufficiently elevated. This is not to deny that even among the peerage there may have been a number of individuals who preferred to stay away from the court. Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, the son of Elizabeth I’s ill-fated last favounte, is a case in point. Essex had to accept divorce from his wife during the reign of James I because the King preferred her to marry his favourite Somerset. He had political reasons to be discontented as well, especially after 1629 when Charles I abandoned all attempts at armed intervention on the continent. Essex himself was a strong proponent of a warlike pro-Protestant foreign policy19. It is therefore not altogether surprising that one of the very few occasions on which Essex seems to have attended the court was during the Prince Palatine’s visit to England in 1636. According to Finet’s notebooks Essex accompanied the Prince to Newmarket in January of that year20.

19In general, however, there seems to have been no clear correlation between attendance at court and political preferences. Even during the 1630s the court remained the natural point of contact, at least in a social sense, for most political factions within the social elite. It has frequently been argued that together with the unpopularity of royal foreign and domestic policy Charles I’s attempts to make his court more orderly and decorous – thereby rendering his entourage more exlusive – created an almost unbridgeable gulf between Court and Country21. This traditional interpretation now seems less convincing than it used to.

III

20Nevertheless, some historians have recently tried to revive the idea of a deep antagonism between Court and Country. L. J. Reeve, for example, author of The Road to Personal Rule which deals with the political history of the period 1629 to 1633, has tried to show that the openness of the court in the social sense, which he does not deny, was irrelevant in political terms According to Reeve, Charles I was a monarch not much given to listening to the advice of his own Privy Council. If even a seat in the Privy Council was no guarantee of political influence, then, Reeve argues, a simple officeholder in the royal household was likely to have even less influence on political affairs if he did not belong to the monarch’s immediate entourage. Reeve assumes that somebody who attended the court only on a non-official basis was bound to be totally excluded from the corridors of power. Reeve distinguishes between the court in the wider sense and a "political court", which he defines as "an inner group about the King who shared his values, views and aspirations and whose political interaction with him determined high policy"22.

21Reeve’s thesis is important not only for the debate between revisionists and anti-revisionists about the causes of the English Civil War, it is also a statement about the nature of politics in early-17th-century England and, as such, it is of considerable relevance for assessing the value of prosopographical studies in this period. According to Reeve 17th-century politics were dominated in the last resort by ideological conflict and the contest of principles. In his opinion, the fact that certain people or groups of people were members of a given institution, the Privy Council, for example, or the King’s Bedchamber, does not really tell us very much about that institution. Such facts, he argues, are of little significance for the true structure of politics, not only because formal membership of an institution was by no means a guarantee of real political influence but also because personal ambitions and personal interests obviously counted for little if politics really were primarily a conflict of principles23.

22But is Reeve’s assumption that ideological conflict dominated politics and that the court as a social milieu was clearly divided politically into Ins and Outs based on sufficient evidence? The answer to this question of course depends very much on which period we are looking at, that is, whether we are examining the first three years of the King’s rule (1625 to 1628), when George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, dominated the court, or the later years, the 1630s. It cannot be denied that during the first years of Charles I’s reign political influence was indeed largely monopolized by Buckingham, and his clients24. If we were to distinguish between a political court and the court in the wider sense, it would indeed be plausible to identify the political court during the years 1625 to 1628 with the Duke of Buckingham’s clients The trouble with such a definition of the political court, however, is that Buckingham’s clients were quite clearly not a group whose members were committed to a fixed set of principles and values. What Buckingham required from his clients was loyalty and a certain degree of submissiveness, perhaps, but not a personal commitment to ideological principles25. Indeed, one might ask whether Buckingham himself was ever ideologically committed in this way. A man who moved with such ease from one political position to another, diametrically opposed to the first, in matters of foreign policy as much as in ecclesiastical affairs, can hardly qualify as a man of high principle26.

23It is therefore not surpnsing that we find men of very different persuasions among Buckingham’s clients and supporters. In ecclesiastical matters, for example, it may be true that the Duke allied himself with the anti-Calvinist, Arminian clergy after the summer of 162627, but, nevertheless, many of his lay clients either avoided any clear commitment in these matters or continued to be fairly strict Calvinists The Earl of Holland, a Gentleman of the Bedchamber, one of the Duke’s closest allies from 1625 to 1628, provides a good example of this attitude28, and Edward Sackville, Earl of Dorset, who was appointed Queen’s Chamberlain in 1628, is another case in point When Buckingham tried to raise taxes without parliament’s consent in 1626-27, Dorset gave him his full support29, but in ecclesiastical matters he seems to have favoured a cautious consensus policy30. The members of the innermost core of the court were almost all united during the period 1625- 1628 by their close connection with the King’s favourite31, but they had little else in common.

24Admittedly matters changed to some extent after the Duke’s death, during the Personal Rule of Charles 132. The King was a man of much firmer convictions than his former favourite and less inclined to compromise in matters of importance, in particular when he thought that his honour and prerogative or his position as supreme governor of the church were at stake Men who favoured a recall of parliament even under circumstances which were not favourable to the King, or the resumption of a costly belligerent foreign policy, or a more liberal ecclesiastical policy therefore did find it difficult to gam influence at court. But the alignment of factions at Charles’ court remained fluid and "ideological" conflict was only one among several factors on which the structure of factions was based Personal friendships and animosities, the quest for place and profit, and not least kinship ties were all equally important.

25For the Caroline court as much as for the court of the Tudors it remains true that, in the words of E. W. Ives, factions were groups of "people which have objectives that are seen primarily in personal terms"33. Place and profit loomed so large in political conflicts at court not because courtiers were necessarily more rapacious than other men, but because they were widely seen as legitimate motives for action. There was nothing improper about a courtier petitioning the King for an office, a financially advantageous patent or a title as a peer, but he was moving on much more dangerous ground if he tried to offer the King unsolicited advice on matters of high politics. Thus Thomas Wentworth, the Irish Lord Deputy, could ask to be made an Earl without losing the King’s trust – even though the request was refused34, but it was quite a different matter when a peer or Privy Councillor told the King to his face that he considered extra-parliamentary taxation, such as ship money, illegal35.

26The pursuit of place and profit was an important enough factor in Caroline court politics to prevent any alignment of factions along simply ideological lines. But other circumstances also made such an alignment unlikely. The majority of courtiers holding office after 1630 had gained their positions during between 1624 and 1628. During this time the Duke of Buckingham’s favour and the willingness of would-be officeholders to support the war effort against Spain and later France were decisive preconditions for personal advancement36. After the Duke’s death in 1628 and the end of the wars against Spain and France in 1629/30, many courtiers not only found themselves in the position of clients without a patron, but now also had to support a policy – in particular in foreign affairs where Charles sought to cooperate with Spain for the time being and steer clear of any direct involvement in the continental wars – for which they had not been recruited37. The fact that so many courtiers were already in place when the crucial political readjustment of the years 1628 to 1630 took place ensured that even the innermost confines of the court were never homogeneous in political, ideological or religious terms.

27But the significance of the years when Buckingham had dominated the Caroline court was not just that so many courtiers owed their position to his patronage and had risen to eminence as his supporters. Buckingham did not belong to a well established noble family. As a social upstart he lacked the family connections which his rivals possessed when he first gained power and office at court. To strengthen his position he had therefore procured titles and offices for his male and female relations and had created a network of marriages between these kinsmen and kinswomen and other courtiers. When George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, died, members of his immediate family and courtiers related to him through marriage filled a very high percentage of positions at court. This Villiers connection survived into the 1630s38 . Created to support Buckingham’s personal pursuit of power it lost its original purpose but, nevertheless, continued to function and formed the basis for faction alignments which cut across lines of ideological and religious confrontation

28The relationship between the Villiers family and the Marquis of Hamilton, one of the most important Scottish peers, provides a good example of the way in which kinship ties reinforced or modified other factional affiliations. The young Marquis of Hamilton had married the Duke of Buckingham’s niece, Margaret Feilding, in the 1620s. Apparently consenting to this marriage was one of the conditions Hamilton had to fulfil to gain the Duke’s support for his appointment as a Gentleman of the King’s Bedchamber, a household department which Buckingham was determined to dominate as far as possible after the accession of Charles I.

29Although the marriage had been arranged for political reasons and the husband seems to have hesitated for some time to consummate it39 , Hamilton’s ties with the Villiers family were nevertheless of considerable political importance during the 1630s. Hamilton not only acted as a patron for his wife’s brother, Basil Feilding40 he also maintained contacts with other members of the Villiers connection41. It would certainly be wrong to assume that a kinship tie between two courtiers automatically created a political alliance, but kinship ties certainly did form important channels of communication, whatever use was made of them.

30The Villiers connection remained crucial for the structure of the Caroline court not only because a considerable number of positions at court had been occupied by the Duke’s relatives before 1628 but also because the King continued to treat his murdered favourite’s family as if they were a cadet branch of the royal dynasty. For all those outside the King’s immediate entourage who sought to establish contact with the court or to strengthen the position which they had already obtained there, a marriage alliance with Buckingham’s family therefore remained one of the most obvious means of achieving this aim.

31The Earl of Cork, for example, the richest Protestant planter in Ireland, tried to establish himself at court in the late 1630s. The marriage of Cork’s second son Viscount Kinalmeaky with the Duke’s niece Elizabeth Feilding in December 1639 was not just a token of his success, but to some extent a guarantee that it would be a lasting one42. Another Irish peer, a Catholic of Gaelo-Scottish origins, the Earl of Antrim, provides another example. Antrim was the grandson of the famous Earl of Tyrone, whose military resistance to English rule in Ireland had only been overcome with the utmost difficulty at the end of the 16th century. Under James I, Tyrone had fled to Spain to escape trial on a treason charge43. As an alleged traitor’s grandson and a Catholic, Antrim was certainly not in an ideal position at court. Nevertheless, he managed to improve his situation considerably by marrying the Duke of Buckingham’s widow, Katherine Manners. Although the King at first disapproved of this marriage – partly on the grounds that the Duchess had converted, or rather reconverted, to Catholicism to marry Antrim – Antrim had clearly scored a major success through this match. He gained not only the support of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Laud, who was one of Buckingham’s former clients, but also other important connections44.

32It is remarkable that at the end of the 1630s the wider Villiers family circle included one of the most important Catholic peers of Ireland, Antrim, as well as one of the most ardent Antipapists in Ireland, the Earl of Cork If we take into account that Hamilton, head of one of the leading noble families of Scotland and a strong enough Protestant to fight as the commander of a regiment of volunteers in the army of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in the Thirty Years’ War, also belonged to the Villiers connection45, we clearly recognize that the politics of kinship could be quite independent of the politics of principle. Antrim and Hamilton may not have agreed on matters of ecclesiastical policy but they nevertheless cooperated closely in the late 1630s after Antrim’s marriage to the Duchess of Buckingham46.

IV

33The examples which I have given will suffice to show that court politics cannot satisfactorily be analysed as a contest between homogeneous factions based on the principles of high politics and ideology The politics of personal ambition and animosity and the politics of kinship were frequently as important as ideological factors. Ambition and the quest for financial profit may not always have been the most important motive for the behaviour of courtiers, but an analysis of court politics in such Namierite terms will always retain a high degree of plausibility because other motives could only rarely be admitted openly by those who sought influence at court. The inbuilt rules of court politics were those of a Namierite world – regardless of the character and attitude of the individuals participating in the power struggle at court The rules of court life were designed to regulate personal not ideological conflict, which in theory was excluded by the demand for personal loyalty to the King.

34Thus the court is in many ways a much more suitable subject than parliament or administrative institutions for prosopographical research, which tries to collect information about the origins, personal interests and family ties of those involved in politics. In parliament the language of principle, the language of the common good, the salus publica, had to be spoken The appeal to fundamental laws and to the public interest was certainly often made with less than complete sincerity, but using such formulae cannot have failed to influence to some extent the actual behaviour of those who participated in the political game. Whatever they believed in, they had to present themselves as the defenders of law, liberties, and the true faith and church in order to be accepted by other members of parliament or the public at large47.

35At court on the other hand, a different language and different behaviour were called for. Here it was totally acceptable to further one’s personal interests by seeking the King’s favour and to show loyalty to one’s kin and clients. Those, however, who claimed to fight for abstract principles and tried to influence the monarch’s decisions in matters of high politics on these grounds were indulging in an activity which could easily be seen as illegitimate.

36We are therefore confronted by a paradox. The court would in many ways be the ideal subject for prosopographical research because here the personal interests of individuals were indeed of enormous importance, but because the procedures of court politics were by definition informal and membership of the court was not clearly defined in legal terms, the court tends to resist attempts to analyse its membership and structure with the methods of quantification. Parliament – and the same holds good for similar constitutional or administrative bodies – may be a subject less well suited to an approach which sees history mainly in terms of "chaps", but in practical terms it is much more amenable to such an approach. Not only can membership of parliament be exactly defined, it is also possible to treat all members of parliament as equally important at a certain level. Whatever their personal influence may have been, each had one vote. Moreover, division lists and similar sources can provide information about the position an individual took on a given political issue. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, all the information we are able to collect in this way might still tell us less about what was going on in parliament than data of a similar nature would tell us about what was going on at court. At court, however, we are confronted by the limits of prosopography. In the last resort neither membership of the court, nor membership of the various factions, nor the ties of patronage and friendship which were so important for politics at court are clearly enough defined to be analysed in quantitative terms.