Reformation England and the Performance of Wonder: Automata Technology and the Transfer of Power from Church to State

REFORMATION ENGLAND AND THE PERFORMANCE OF WONDER: AUTOMATA TECHNOLOGY AND THE TRANSFER OF POWER FROM CHURCH TO STATE

Lily FILSON

Abstract. When Henry VIII split England from the Church of Rome, a dramatic aspect of the broad campaign of reform and iconoclasm was the exposure of fraudulent religious imagery, revealing to the public that the revered, “miraculous” statues which seemed to come alive were in fact mere mechanical devices operated by an unseen priest. This paper views the exile of medieval mechanical, moving sculpture from religious spaces and their appearance at court soon after, re-tooled during the Renaissance as classically-derived hydraulic and pneumatic automata, as an as-yet unremarked upon aspect reflective of the transfer of power from Church to State in early modern England. Tudor and Stuart royals as well as a handful of sophisticated men in their orbits constructed gardens, grottoes, and theatres wherein awe-inspiring tableaux of the inanimate “brought to life” could be enjoyed by a privileged few. As the Anglican Church coalesced with the king, rather than the pope, at its head, so too did some of its mysteries and power transfer to the crown.

Keywords: religious history, history of technology, Reformation iconoclasm, English Renaissance, garden history, early-modern automata, Renaissance magic, magical philosophy

Introduction: “Forged Miracles” for the Reformation; Garden Delights for the Renaissance When Henry VIII split England from the Church of Rome, one aspect of the broad campaign of reform and iconoclasm1 was the exposure of fraudulent religious imagery, revealing to the public that the revered and “miraculous” moving statues were in fact mere mechanical devices operated by an unseen priest.2 These and other “forged miracles” were theological lightning rods for the English Reformation‟s religious and political thunder,3 and their exposure broke their enchantment upon the faithful. On the heels of their exile from religious spaces, similar devices appeared at court, re-tooled during the Renaissance as classically-derived hydraulic and pneumatic automata which had proliferated in Italian, French, German, and Dutch contexts in

 Tulane University, History of Art, Newcomb Art Department, School of Liberal Arts, 6823 St. Charles Avenue, New Orleans, LA 70118. E-mail: [email protected]

Society and Politics Vol. 13, No. 2(26)/November 2019 the century prior. The disappearance of mechanical “miracles” from churches and the flourishing of a new kind of wonder steeped in magic and mystery in gardens and palaces positioned the wealthy and cultured as the sole heirs to the Roman Church‟s claim to supernatural powers; Tudor and Stuart royals as well as a handful of sophisticated men in their orbits constructed gardens, grottoes, and palaces wherein awe-inspiring tableaux of the inanimate “brought to life” could be enjoyed by a privileged few. As the Anglican Church coalesced with the king, rather than the pope, at its head, so too did some of its mysteries (and consequent power) apparently transfer to the crown.4 At present, there is an appreciable divide which separates studies of medieval automata in England with their Renaissance successors, though the works of Ely Truitt, Minsoo Kang, and others have begun the great work of placing these objects in broader contexts.5 Church automata are included in a study of the English Reformation‟s suppression of other religious “forgeries,” primarily the notorious trade in a wide variety of questionable relics.6 The “thinly fictionalized” account which Erasmus wrote about his travels in England in 1512-14, the 1526 Peregrinatio religionis ergo (A Pilgrimage for Religion’s Sake), sounded the attack on the monasteries‟ profit- driven trade in the miraculous; amidst the numerous and varied forms which reliquary fraud assumed in the text, the nods from statues of the Virgin Mary in two different locations have a comparatively minor role.7 Likewise, the later automata of the English Renaissance figure peripherally within broader studies of the era‟s efflorescence of material culture, grouped with the other cultural products of the short-lived Henrician-era “lost Renaissance.” 8 Elsewhere, they are related to the intersection of John Dee‟s magical and mechanical philosophies which informed the Elizabethan age,9 as well as to the phenomenon of the English Renaissance garden.10 The unique character of Renaissance automata in general figures into a wider selection of studies which tend to overlook their English iterations.11 Eugenio Battisti called for an iconology of this type of automata and made note of the stripping away of their medieval religious connotations and their assumption of a role in the epistemological order, though this phenomenon in England specifically was not taken into consideration.12

Manufacturing “Living” Statues through the Sixteenth Century The secret of bringing “statues to life” has a long association with the rituals of rulers and religion. Mesopotamian and Egyptian practices revolved around the harnessing of some divine, celestial quality in a man-made vessel, in many cases an anthropomorphic sculpture.13 The later Greco-Egyptian Asclepius text of the Hermetic corpus and the theurgic writings of Neoplatonic philosophers in late antiquity14 transmitted to the Renaissance a distillation of this method of harnessing sidereal powers via their terrestrial corollaries which made its way to the magical philosophy of Elizabethan England. From the time of Hellenistic Alexandria, a concurrent mechanical tradition produced the “living” cult statues which made its temples famous (and wealthy). Some devices‟ workings are known through Ctesibios, preserved in fragmentary form in the works of Vitruvius, his successor Philo of Byzantium, and Hero of Alexandria.15 These designs harnessed the powers of water, air, and heat, and 21

Lily Filson - Reformation England and the Performance of Wonder … they made their way to Latin Europe by way of their preservation and modification by technicians of the Medieval Islamic Golden Age, such as Al-Jazari‟s Book of Ingenious Devices. These kinds of devices were published both in Latin and vernacular languages by the close of the sixteenth century, as they were being enthusiastically applied by hydraulic engineers, natural philosophers, and other iterations of the Renaissance magus.16 Before the English Reformation, moving statues were deployed in Catholic churches to inspire faith in their medieval Christian audience. Historians have recognized that for the religious climate of the day, distinctions between material and spiritual or earthly and divine were not as rigid as they subsequently became. It was possible for an ingenious mechanism to be miraculous all the same, and the successful achievement of apparently-autonomous motion would be a justifiable means for the Church‟s objective of demonstrating to the faithful that a miracle could and did occur. These automata were “neither passive nor rote.... they were representations in motion, inspirited statues: they were mechanical and divine,”17 and the exploration of this “supernatural universe” of Catholics and Protestants alike has been hailed among recent scholarship‟s significant achievements.18

Casualties of Iconoclasm Widespread destruction of church automata and the exposure of their workings during the reign of Henry VIII eliminated most of the material documents of this phenomenon; only a handful of medieval roods still exist, due to some being hidden in church walls and rediscovered many centuries later.19 The most emblematic of the “fraudulent miracles,” inveighed against as one of the “paradigms of popish deceit,”20 however did not survive: the Rood of Grace, a mechanical Christ on a crucifix at Boxley Abbey in Kent from the fourteenth century. Its associated pilgrims‟ badges, often fragmentary, have been identified and document its appearance to a limited degree (figs. 1-2).21 Preceding its destruction, its workings were exhibited to the masses at Maidstone and later to Henry VIII at Westminster.22 The Rood originally displayed a wide range of movement: bowing, straightening up, shaking hands and feet, nodding its head, and a range of emotional expressions made possible by moving eyebrows, eyes and lips able to be manipulated “by stringes of hair.”23 However, before approaching the mechanized Christ, pilgrims would pass before another mechanical contrivance in the figure of Saint Rumwald which would raise its arm in blessing.24 A contemporary account reveals its hidden function: “by the helpe of an engine fixed to the back thereof,” a kind of foot-pedal allowed the priest to move the hands of what seemed to be a stone statue and to grant, by mechanical proxy, acknowledgment of the purity of those who sought the Rood of Grace. A secondary feature was a rigged test of religious faith and physical strength in the stamp of the Arthurian legend‟s enchanted sword in the stone.25

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Figures 1-2. Fragments of medieval lead-alloy pilgrims‟ badges from Boxley Abbey, Kent. Image from the public domain.

The “idolatrie and craft” of other roods and holy objects were summarily revealed: at Paul‟s cross by John Hilsey, bishop of Rochester26 and Nicholas Wyse attacked in writing a rood which “have made the people to beleve & thynke that the heare of his heed & berde did grow.”27 In Wiltshire, the Rood of Ramsbury, which was famed to be immovable by sixteen oxen, was taken down by one man.28 Another example of the type is documented in sixteenth-century Brittany: a mechanical Jesus rolled his eyes, moved his lips, and spurted blood from the wound in his side and was accompanied by another mechanized, gesticulating Virgin Mary with three attendants as well as a head with moving eyes fixed on top to symbolize the Trinity.29 During the reign of Henry VII, a thin wire allowed unconsecrated Eucharistic bread to apparently fly from the paten in the prior‟s hand to the priory rood loft, where the “holy maid” Elizabeth of Leominster (Herefordshire) was imprisoned.30 The secret of the venerated “Our ladyes taper” at Cardigan, a candle believed to burn indefinitely without being consumed, owed to the concealed presence of wood.31 All over England through the early 1540‟s, the campaign of dismantling “superstitious” objects continued, including the shrine of St. Hugh at Lincoln, St. William of York, and other “divers feigned jewels and relics.”32 The impulse to destroy the cross and crucifix can be traced as far back as the Lollards in the fifteenth century.33 In stark contrast are areas which have retained a Catholic identity through the present day; sporadic episodes of miraculous “living” sculpture, most notably the Virgin Mary of Ballinspittle, North Ireland (fig. 3).34 These and other icons which have been known to sweat or bleed likewise have their antecedents in ancient Greek and Roman sources.35

Figure 3. The Grotto of the Virgin Mary of Ballinspittle, North Ireland. Image from the public domain.

Lily Filson - Reformation England and the Performance of Wonder …

By the late Medieval period and the English Reformation, miraculous forgeries were already a well-worn cliché for the greed of the clergy, and its physical evidence could be interpreted in two ways: that of Erasmus, which dictated it be stamped out, or an evangelical, apocalyptic reading which took these deceptive automata and relics to be the false wonders of the Antichrist.36 This reading was assigned to the Rood of Grace and other images which appeared to speak, move, or grow their beards in the 1538 translation of Heinrich Bullinger‟s commentary on 2 Thessalonians.37 Henry VIII was hailed in his God-given role to overthrow “supersticions, counterfeite religion, (and) feyned reliques” by John Pylbarough in a 1540 panegyric.38 The exposure of the non-divine, mechanical working of the religious automata was recognized by one historian to be a valuable and flexible hermeneutic prism which reflected the regime‟s new policies in a favorable light.39 At the same time, diverse statutes and the revival of sumptuary laws in 1533 stressed the importance that things be what they seemed (including weights, dyes, coins, and other aspects of the economy); to be anything other was to be an affront to the king‟s majesty.40The reign of Edward VI saw the further exposure of religious automata, “artificial figures which moved their heads, arms, and legs,”41 and, notwithstanding efforts at a Catholic revival led by Mary Tudor, under the reigns of Elizabeth and James, “counterfeit miracles” continued as a staple of Protestant polemical texts.42

Magical Philosophy and Automata of the Garden and Grotto in the English Renaissance The reactionary religious climate which prevailed through the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries‟ Tudor line of succession dictated that the “magical” Neoplatonic and hermetic-derived automata could not yet thrive at the English court as they did at its continental counterparts. The philosophical ground for this kind of object was prepared in large part initially by the Elizabethan magus John Dee (1527- 1608) and his circle under the benevolent approval of Elizabeth I. Dee possessed an extensive library of Neoplatonic, Hermetic, and magical works, and his collection was open between 1570 and 1583 to a wide swath of persons, including scholars and mechanicians as well as royalty and nobles.43 In the later age of the nineteenth century, romantic and morbid sensibilities imagined the famous Renaissance magus as a necromancer, working upon what appears to be the erect figure of a corpse in a church graveyard (fig. 4); a more proper historical vision would change the setting to a royal or courtly garden, and the upright figure to a mechanical statue. At the heart of the Renaissance magical tradition embraced by Dee was the doctrine of a correspondence between man and planetary rulers and, in consequence, the inherent capacity of man to manipulate higher realms through the purification of his soul, and ultimately commune directly with the higher divine powers of the heavens (and ultimately beyond the firmament to where the residence of the Creator, or the First Mover, had been fixed since antiquity).

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Figure 4. John Dee as Necromancer from The Astrologer of the Nineteenth Century; Sibley, E., (London: ca. 1825). Image from the public domain.

For the erudite Renaissance philosopher, the doctrine of a correspondence between man, nature, and planetary influences inherited from antiquity propelled associations in the natural world which promised mankind unprecedented control over his environment, terrestrial as well as cosmic. A practical side of this dogma can be read in the Asclepius text from the Corpus Hermeticum brought to light by Marsilio Ficino a century prior in Florence with its instructions to invest a statue with life-giving spiritus,44 and Neoplatonist philosophers of late antiquity whose works were translated as well incorporated the manufacture of thus invested, “living” statues under the mantle of theurgy.45 The union of this magical philosophy and pneumatic engineering relied on the force of the unseen but manifestly powerful air, which as a concept was only beginning to become divorced from the metaphysical idea of spirit; this blend of the spiritual with the mechanical survived in Renaissance thaumaturgy and early modern scientific instruments.46 The idea of a mechanical object participating in sacred harmony with a higher realm of mathematics allowed the Renaissance magus and mechanician alike to realize the “magical” automata of their day.47 In Dee‟s own Mathematicall Preface, the inseparability of the practical and the mystical is asserted; the practitioner, like the bee, derived both useful wax and delightful honey from the same flower.48 Dee passed his enthusiasm for Renaissance magic to the Elizabethan Renaissance and later courts to come. One of Queen Elizabeth‟s favorite gardens to visit was also the only garden in England which brought her into contact with grottoes and automata in the 25

Lily Filson - Reformation England and the Performance of Wonder … continental style. Sir Francis Carew (1530-1611) rose to fame and favor through the great house and garden he created on his family‟s estate in Beddington, Surrey (fig. 5).

Figure 5. Present-day Carew Manor School, Beddington, Surrey; only part of the building dates to 1490, and most construction dates from the early eighteenth century, remodeled in the mid-nineteenth. Image from the public domain.

A description from 1600 of a stream which flows through a number of hydraulic automata, including Polyphome playing the pipe and “a Hydra out of whose many heads the water gushes.”49 Eleven years later, another visitor noted “all sorts of neatly made animals and little men as though they were alive.”50 In the 1570‟s, payments were made to “the Frenche gardyners” responsible for realizing the waterworks, and these early Elizabethan automata, water effects, and grottoes were directly modelled after French assimilations of I talian models indebted to Classical forms.51 Florentine garden design by the last quarter of the sixteenth century showcased animated automata in artificial garden grottoes, fantastic, liminal spaces between myth and reality. Francesco I de‟ Medici‟s Villa Pratolino (completed ca. 1575, fig. 6) boasted more grottoes and automata than any previous construction, and imitations of its features figure broadly throughout the royal and aristocratic gardens of Europe for centuries to come.52 The magical, the heretical and the forbidden functioned as incentives rather than obstacles to Francesco I‟s patronage of wide- ranging inquiries into the mysteries of nature. In effect, these “magical” automata which emerged from the spirit of experimentalism fostered by sixteenth-century “natural magic” presented alternatives, rooted in the ancient pre-Christian traditions, to medieval Church‟s “miraculous” statues.

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Figure 6. Lunette by Giusto Utens of the Villa Pratolino outside of Florence. Giusto Utens, Pratolino, 1600 ca., painted lunette, 47 x 59 in., Florence, Petraia Villa Medici. Image from the public domain.

In the “stylistic backwater” of England however, animated automata and other trappings in the Florentine stamp arrived later than at its continental counterparts; the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts could not offer comparable social prestige which awaited the accomplished hydraulic engineer on the continent.53 Until 1625, sculpture in England remained “dead” in every sense of the word: not only static affairs visually, but commissioned almost exclusively for tombs and sacred spaces.54 Although there are known examples of ornamental waterworks from the Tudor period, such as the lead pipes which brought water to an ornamental pool at Theobalds through two sculpted serpents‟ mouths,55 very few moving statues populated the Renaissance English garden at this point. While his predecessors on the throne‟s focus was devoted to the affairs of state, Prince Henry, in the patronage model of his mother Queen Anne of Denmark, re-imagined the esoteric, Mannerist currents flowing from Florence and Prague through a Protestant lens.56 A tide-change was signaled by the planning of hydraulic engineering works in England in earnest at the initiative of Prince Henry of Wales, which, if it had been fully realized, would have been a “Stuart Pratolino” full of virtuosic displays of the age‟s achievements in the arts, sciences, and philosophical currents. Prince Henry has been dubbed “the Prince par excellence of Renaissance hermetic science in England,”57 and like Francesco I de‟ Medici and Rudolph II, who were the vanguard of late-Renaissance material culture‟s embrace of esoteric knowledge on the continent, the Prince of Wales favored direct observation of those at work, “yea even those of mechanicall and meane persons.”58 His court mirrored this fascination for scientific inquiry and experimentation and actively sought to engage proven masters of the style: namely, Tommaso (1571-1648) and Alessandro Francini, who had worked at Pratolino and successfully introduced the same line of 27

Lily Filson - Reformation England and the Performance of Wonder … automata, grottoes, and fountains for the French court at Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Fontainebleau. Henry however did not get his first choice, but another Florentine artist in service to the French royal house was made available. The engagement from 1611 to 1615 of the Florentine Constantino de‟ Servi (ca. 1554-1622) brought direct experience of Medici grottoes and automata to England. De‟ Servi initially worked under Bernardo Buontalenti, the master architect of Francesco I‟s Mannerist Mecca. De‟ Servi‟s sojourn in England has been speculated to have also been in service as a spy, as records indicate that he was kept on the Medici payroll through all of his postings, which may explain why such a widely- travelled artist succeeded in realizing so few works.59 However, a rare completed drawing of De‟ Servi‟s garden for Prince Henry is a testament to a real skill (or at least ambition), although his full vision was never realized due to the monarchy‟s perennial tightness of funds.60 At Richmond Palace, the first major royal building erected since the 1530‟s,61 De‟ Servi projected a huge “Neptune” which was to be three times the size of Giambologna‟s Appenine colossus at Pratolino (fig. 7).62

Figure 7. Giambologna (Jean de Boulogne), Apennine Colossus, 1580, Villa Pratolino. Image from the public domain.

Whereas the Florentine original possessed a series of internal grottoes, fountains, and tableaux of moving automata, De‟ Servi imagined a similarly expanded version, with “many rooms in it, a great dovecot in the head and two grottoes in the base.”63 Further grottoes and fountains were planned, and De‟ Servi at the time wrote proudly of Prince Henry‟s delight in his designs, explicitly including fountains and grottoes among them.64 Contemporary accounts of his disastrous command of 28

Society and Politics Vol. 13, No. 2(26)/November 2019 theatrical machinery, which marred the Campion‟s masque for the marriage of the Earl of Somerset in 1613, does not instill tremendous faith in his actual capacities.65 De‟ Servi was to be eclipsed by the arrival at court of the French Huguenot Salomon de Caus (1576-1626), who had studied first-hand the hydraulic wonders at Pratolino, the Villa d‟Este at Tivoli, and other lavish Italian water gardens of note. Unlike De‟ Servi, De Caus successfully constructed works directly inspired by Pratolino‟s, including a Mount Parnassus with Apollo, Muses, and four descending rivers at Somerset House and a grotto-aviary at Greenwich.66 De Caus‟s series of engravings in his 1615 book Les Raisons des Forces Mouvantes document their appearances and affinities with their models at Pratolino. De Caus‟s works for Henry at Richmond Palace however remain, like De‟ Servi‟s, elusive ghosts, as no descriptions of this elaborate series survive. Other engravings in the Raisons, published after Henry‟s death, are detailed by De Caus‟s text to have been executed to satisfy the prince‟s taste for the novel. Notable automata in these include a Pan and an Apollo before Midas (fig. 8), a nymph playing a hydraulic organ, a Cupid holding aloft a torch with streams of water (fig. 9) which recalls a similar arrangement at Pratolino,67 and a recreation of the Alexandrian speaking statue of Memnon erected at the top of an artificial rectangular hill, projected to be 55 feet high (fig. 10).68 De Caus often directly cites Pratolino‟s forms; a winged female holding a trumpet on top of an artificial hill (fig. 11) imitates the form of another Florentine predecessor. We find the latter‟s inspiration in the “Fame” automaton of Pratolino documented by the artists Giovanni Guerra and Stefano della Bella, about a century removed from each other (figs. 12 and 13).69 Another colossus (fig. 14), this one seated, likewise derived from Giambologna‟s renowned Appenine.

Figure 8. Salomon de Caus, Grotto with King Midas, Pan, Apollo, and Nymphs from Les Raisons des Forces Mouvants, Livre Second (Paris: C. Sevestre, 1624), pl. 15. Digitized through Gallica, an initiative of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Lily Filson - Reformation England and the Performance of Wonder …

Figure 9. De Caus, Cupid Fountain from Les Raisons des Forces Mouvants, Livre Second , pl. 3.

Figure 10. De Caus, Artificial Hill with Colossus from Les Raisons des Forces Mouvants, Livre Second, pl. 10.

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Figure 11. De Caus, Winged Automaton atop an Artificial Mount from Les Raisons des Forces Mouvants, pl. 46.

Figure 12. Giovanni Guerra, Grotto of Fame, detail. Albertina Museum, Vienna. 1601.

Lily Filson - Reformation England and the Performance of Wonder …

Figure 13. Stefano della Bella, Grotto of Fame, 1600 ca. Published in Bernardo Sansone Sgrilli, Descrizione della Regia Villa, Fontane, e Fabbriche di Pratolino (Firenze, 1742), p. 22.

Figure 14. De Caus, Seated Colossus from Les Raisons des Forces Mouvants, Expériences (Paris: C. Sevestre, 1624), pl. 14.

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Figure 15. Robert Lemyinge (?), “The Dell,” 16th c., ink on paper. Reproduced in Paula Henderson, “Sir Francis Bacon‟s Water Gardens at Gorhambury,” Garden History 20 (1992): 116-131; 120.

De Caus‟s work was not limited to the royal family, but similarly elaborate automata do not appear to have been granted in the seventeenth century to those outside of their circle. The French hydraulic engineer also authored a series of cascading fountains at Hatfield after 1608, when Robert Cecil acquired the old royal palace. A drawing of “The Dell” (fig. 14), a water parterre likely executed by Robert Lemyinge, includes a hippocamp and a mermaid flanking a banqueting house at its center, and these were likely statues or fountains.70 Within the bottom stream we see what have been described as stick-figures which may be indicative of the “neatly made fishes, frogs etc. swimming in the fountain as if they were alive” documented in 1611 at the gardens of Sir Francis Carew at Beddington, Surrey.71 Were any of these true automata though? At Francesco I de‟ Medici‟s Pratolino, swans and ducks appeared to swim around in the grottoes‟ ornamental ponds, but the while the taste for trompe l’oeil ornamental animals in garden ponds and other novel uses of water seems to have been present, 72 some accounts of the “life” in the English garden in the Renaissance turn out to be red herrings. Descriptions of life- like images of fish in the water at Sir Francis Bacon‟s estate of Gorhambury in a 1656 description by John Aubrey are found to be clever mosaics.73 An attempt in the early nineteenth century to locate any trace of them failed,74 but digging down to the ponds‟ claybed in 1934 produced results, which were mentioned in the diary of Violet, 4th Countess of Verulam.75 By no means were Renaissance moving statues of man, god, and beast relegated to the garden solely. Awe-inspiring automata in Medieval England, as was

Lily Filson - Reformation England and the Performance of Wonder … the case in continental Christendom, had been deployed in tandem with other forms of theatrical machinery in religious dramas,76 and after the Protestant Reformation, which sounded the death knell for “papistical, superstitious, and Catholic forms of public expression,”77 illusionistic mechanics found new life in courtly spectacles designed by some of the same royal engineers mentioned above. The hallmarks of Florentine masques were stunning transformation scenes achieved by masterful engineering feats, including but not limited to the presentation of scenes behind a proscenium arch as moving pictures, which made its debut at the Medici court in 1586.78 The 1605 Masque of Blackness put on by Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones represents the earliest English attempt at the marriage of machinery and perspective stage settings in the style of the Florentine intermezzi to an elaborate allegorical paean to the monarchy. Hymen (1606), the Haddington Masque (1608), and Queens (1609) all made use of the machina versatilis, a revolving machine which was responsible for scene changes.79 This was the same period in which Prince Henry dispatched his closest friend, John Harington, to Florence with a mission to observe and document the 1608 festivities of the Grand Duke‟s son Cosimo to the Archduchess Maria Maddalena, and thereafter even the most Anglo-centric of celebrations incorporated the Italians‟ mechanical artifice; for example the Barriers performed on Twelfth Night in 1610 around the theme of the Arthurian legends combined the chivalric traditions of a tournament with perspective staging once reserved exclusively for court masques.80The Queen’s Masque, staged by Samuel Daniel, on the night of Henry‟s investiture as the Prince of Wales in the summer of the same year, employed the machina versatilis to reveal an amazing grotto constructed by Inigo Jones which, instead of automata, housed the Queen and her ladies; the same mechanism later caused them to “suddenly vanish.”81 The drawings which survive from Inigo Jones‟s 1611 masque Oberon. The Fairy Prince provide an over-abundance of mechanical solutions to problems of stage design, as two sets (both incomplete) with different machinery have survived.82 At the Barriers and other showings at the tilt as well as in numerous masques (some which were never performed), Prince Henry is cast (or rather casts himself) as the successor to Elizabethan militancy and the hero of a universal Protestant reform. However, lest there be any doubt about the compatibility of Protestantism with the magical undercurrents of late-Renaissance Neoplatonism, the Memorable Masque by George Chapman reveals the religious conversion of the Indians of Virginia, the colonization of which was revived by Prince Henry‟s patronage. Laden with hermetic symbolism, the Indians in effect exchange one sun god for another, their “superstitious worship” of the sun for “this our Briton Phoebus, whose bright sky/ Enlightened with a Christian piety) Is never subject to black Error‟s night…”83 Roy Strong recognized in the masque‟s climax a paraphrasing of the Orphic hymn of the Sun. Another work which takes its principal direction from Orphic themes and articulates more explicitly the royal prerogative to magical traditions of statue animation is the 1613 Lords’ Masque by Thomas Campion (1567?-1620).84 In this masque, the theurgy of living statues intersects with the astral magic of Neoplatonic ritual: stars are drawn to Earth as fiery spirits by Orphic song.85 Eight “stars” were 34

Society and Politics Vol. 13, No. 2(26)/November 2019 engineered for the stage play by Inigo Jones whose mechanisms exhausted the writer‟s descriptive capacities.86 It bears underlining that in the contemporary treatise by Thomas Tymme, A Dialogue Philosophical, which took as its objective the explication of Cornelius Drebbel‟s perpetual motion machine presented to James I, the stars and planets‟ individual “vitall faculties and complexions” “doe power them forth into the lap of the inferior Elements, animating and forming them.”87 The sincerely held view of the age‟s natural philosophers that these unrelenting “Astrall seeds” coupled with the seeds of the elements to produce matter found its enactment in Campion‟s play shortly thereafter when “four noble women- statues of silver” are transformed into living women by a sung invocation:

Powerful Jove, that of bright stars, Now hast made men fit for wars, Thy power in these statues prove And make them women fit for love.88

The statue-women are destined for eight men which Prometheus crafted from clay immediately prior, and their numbers are shortly doubled to provide each clay-man with a match; this was, after all, a masque for the royal nuptials of Princess Elizabeth Stuart, Prince Henry‟s sister, and Frederick V, Elector Palatine. The dancing couples onstage at one point even included the royal groom and his bride. Although Henry did not live to see their wedding, Campion‟s masque is testament to the royals‟ inheritance of the seemingly-supernatural power to bring statues to life.

Conclusion Although most of the grandiose examples drawn on paper of what would have become the English Mannerist style never were constructed after Prince Henry‟s catastrophic death in 1612,89 automata and illusionistic machinery around the Tudor and Stuart courts resurrected a phenomenon formerly invested with religious significance forcefully extinguished only less than a century prior. In the church, the court theatre, or the garden grotto, moving sculpture inspired not only feelings of wonder and surprise but also their presence put in exposition both ancient and contemporary philosophical and mechanical secrets of the thaumaturgical class: be they temple priests, medieval abbots, or Renaissance magi, mathematicians, and engineers.90 Water not only articulated the power ideology of the ruler asa visual demonstration of the source of all political, cultural and material largesse and patronage,91 it was key to bringing to life the garden sculpture of the late Renaissance. The ability of the hydraulic engineer to harness the forces of water, fire, and especially air, which carried with it the mantle of Stoic and Neoplatonic philosopher‟s concept of the spirit-pneuma, closely intertwined with the natural magic of the age.92 Whereas the well-known perpetual-motion machine of Cornelius Drebbel was hailed as an instrument which simultaneously made evident and harnessed the principles of motion of heaven and earth, the automaton must be reevaluated as an instrument by which the understanding of the secrets of life itself were put on display. And the Renaissance magus, unlike his predecessors in antiquity and the middle ages, 35

Lily Filson - Reformation England and the Performance of Wonder … was inherently practical. The hydraulic engineer‟s feats were blunt articulations that the ambition of hermetic science had been achieved: man wielded control over nature, he had mined her secrets and implemented them for his own betterment. In England, where the power of “miraculous” crucifixes and “living” saints in Catholic churches had been annulled by the revelation of their mechanisms, both the technology and its instruments could freely assume another role, no less invested with spiritual implication, as handmaiden in the magus and natural philosopher‟s quest for the domination of nature and the discovery of her secrets.

References 1 On the “insular peculiarity” of this phenomenon in England, see Aston, M. “Cross and Crucifix in the English Reformation,” Historische Zeitschrift Beihefte 33 (2002): 253-72. 2 This phenomenon belongs to a wider pattern which had as its aim the abolishment of the pope‟s power; other major events were the destruction of the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury and the staging of a river pageant on the Thames in 1539 which mocked the papal pretensions. See Bernard, G. W., “The Making of Religious Policy, 1533-1546: Henry VIII and the Search for the Middle Way,” The Historical Journal 14 (1998): 321-349; 324. As the English Reformation progressed and these mechanical idols were exposed, Henry VIII‟s anti-papal stance effectively exploited the Protestant reformers‟ rhetoric in a way which would elevate royal supremacy to new heights; see esp. 327 of same. 3 E.g. the ability to forge miracles was one of six theological flashpoints which preachers were ordered to steer clear of in a 1534 order by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. See Marshall, P., “Forgery and Miracles in the Reign of Henry VIII,” Past & Present 178 (2003): 39-73; 39; Cranmer, T., Miscellaneous Writings and Letters, ed. John Edmund Cox (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1846), 460-1. 4 For more on these changes, see Bernard, G. W., (1998), 341. 5 Truitt, E. R., Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Kang, M., Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). 6 E.g. the milk of the Virgin at Walsingham exposed to be in all probability a mixture of powdered chalk and egg white, pig bones taken for saints‟ relics, the Holy Blood of Christ from the abbey of Hailes in Gloucestershire which was submitted to be first duck‟s blood, then saffron and honey, the relic from Calais which was proved to be a sheep‟s tail, etc. For these and others see Bernard, G. W., (1998), 341. 7 “Oygius. Mother and Son both seemed to nod approval, unless my eyes deceived me.” Erasmus, D., The Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. Nathan Bailey, ed. E. Johnson (London: Reeves and Turner, 1878), vol. 2, 14. And elsewhere: “Menedemus. What did the Virgin do at this? Didn‟t she indicate by the slightest nod that your short prayer was heard? Ogyius. As I told you, there was a dim religious light, and she stood in the shadows, to the right of the altar. Finally, the first custodian‟s harangue had so squelched me that I didn‟t dare lift my eyes.” Erasmus, D., (1878), 16. 8 See Strong, R., Henry Prince of Wales (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1989), 86-7. On England‟s Renaissance automata, he recognizes their complex identity as not only a revival of antique technology but also potent symbols on several levels; nevertheless, the connection to the church automata of pre-Reformation England is never made.

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9 See in particular “John Dee and the Mechanicians: Applied Science in Elizabethan England,” in French, P., John Dee: the World of an Elizabethan Magus (New York: Dorset Press, 1972), 160- 87. 10 See Knox, T., “Complicated Beauties”: The Artificial Grotto in England, c. 1600 to the Present Day” in Artefici d'acqua e giardini: La cultura delle grotte e dei ninfei in Italia e in Europa, eds. Isabella Lapi Ballerini and Litta Maria Medri (Firenze: Centro Di, 1999), 48-60; Leslie, M., “Spenser, Sidney, and the Renaissance Garden,” English Literary Renaissance 22 (1992): 3-36. 11 See “Between Magic and Mechanics: The Automaton in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,” in Minsoo Kang, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 55- 102. Kang‟s discussion of English automata, both magical and mechanical, focuses primarily on the “Brazen Head” tradition associated with Roger Bacon, Friar Bungey, Albertus Magnus, and other Churchmen philosophers; the living statues of Shakespearian plays are brought to bear on the discussion, but nothing is made of the great ideological chasm of the Reformation between these two chapters of automata history in England. 12 Battisti, E., L’antirinascimento (Milan: Garzanti, 1989), 249-86; see also Brunon, H., “L'artifice animé: sur l'esthetique maniériste de l'automate” in Artefici d'acqua e giardini: La cultura delle grotte e dei ninfei in Italia e in Europa, eds. Isabella Lapi Ballerini and Litta Maria Medri (Firenze: Centro Di, 1999), 164-79. 13 See Ellis, R., “‟Papsukkal‟ figures beneath the daises of Mesopotamian temples,” Revue d’Assyriologie 61 (1967): 51-61; Loukioanoff, G., ”Une statue parlante, ou Oracle du dieu Re- Hermakhis,” Annales du service des Antiquités de l’Egypte (Cairo, 1936): 187-193. 14 For an overview of the principal texts and authors as well as the multifaceted nature of the practice and philosophy of Neoplatonic theurgy, see Luck, G., “Theurgy and Forms of Worship in Neoplatonism,” Religion, Science, and Magic: In Concert and in Conflict, eds. Neusner, J., et al. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 185-228. 15 See Long, P. O., Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 25-8. The great strides made in mechanical engineering in Alexandria can be attributed to, as Long demonstrates, the Ptolemies‟ expansion of the traditional canon of the Greek academies to make room for mechanical knowledge, technē, at the Museum. In the writings of Philo of Byzantium, the technical information he communicates is explicitly intended to be displayed at the Ptolemaic court, underlining the openness of the society and the relatively free circulation of mechanical know-how. 16 On their widespread dissemination and lasting influence upon modern scientific history (specifically the theory of elastic fluids), see Boas, M., “Hero‟s Pneumatica: A Study of its Transmission and Influence,” Isis 40 (1949):38-48. 17 Riskin, J., The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 22. 18 Marshall, P., (2003), 40. 19 Such as the wooden rood from Kemeys inferior, Monmouthshire (Wales); Aston, M., (2002), 261, fig. 4b; for a color image see “Wooden crucifix originally sparkled with gold,” National Museum Cardiff, accessed May 25, 2017, http://museum.wales/articles/2007-09-04/Wooden- crucifix-originally-sparkled-with-gold. 20 Marshall, P., (2003), 54. 21 The most complete example can be seen in Aston, M., (2002), 257, fig. 3; Pilgrim badge from Boxley Abbey, 15th c., lead alloy, 93 x 66 mm, London, National Museum of London. 22 Bernard, G. W., (1998), 331.

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23 Riskin, J., (2016), 12; quoted from Wriothesley, C. A., A Chronicle of England during the Reign of the Tudors, 1485-1559, ed. William Hamilton. 2 vols. (London: Camden Society, 1875), 1:75; see also Jones, M., “Theatrical History in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament” ELH 66.2 (1999): 223- 60. Elsewhere are described its “certen Ingynes & old wyer wyth olde Roton stykkes in the backe of the same that dyd cause the eyes of the same to move & stere in the head therof lyke unto a lyvelye thyng,” Quoted without citation in Marshall, P., (2003), 54. See also Aston, M., (2002), 255; Marshall, P., “The Rood of Boxley, the Blood of Hails and the Defence of the Henrician Church,” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 46 (1995): 689-96. 24 Unknown to the medieval creators and custodians of the medieval Rood of Grace, this gesture of blessing may be read as the continuation of an ancient Egyptian practice wherein a moving statue conferred the hanu, or the selection and blessing of the future pharaoh. this entailed a movement of the arm or the head of a god‟s statue in response to a query; such dependence on divine will invested this performance with a great deal of temporal power, as in the case when the new king was chosen from a line of princes by hanu which was, in reality, the priest's manipulation of its hidden mechanism. Cohen, J., Human Robots in Myth and Science (South Brunswick and New York: A.S. Barnes and Company, 1966), 19-20; see also Ritner, R. K., The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). While the hanu motif would not have been known to contemporaries of the rood, interestingly enough the use of “Egyptian” as a derogative for a range of shifty practices (fortune telling, “subtyle craftye & unlawfull games & plays,” or “feynyng themselfes to have knowledge in physyke, physnamye, palmestrye,”) in a 1530 statute begs the question whether this particular identity- whose accuracy must certainly be questioned-employed illusionistic mechanical devices as well. Marshall, P., (2003), 67. 25 “...this Sainct Rumwald was the picture of a prettie Boy Sainct of stone, standing in the same churche, of it selfe short, and not seeming heavie: but for as much as it was wrought out of a great and weightie stone (being the base thereof) it was hardly to be lifted by the handes of the strongest man. Neverthelesse (such was the conveighance) by the helpe of an engine fixed to its back thereof, it was easily prised up with the foote of him that was the keeper; and therefore, of no moment at all in the handes of such as had offered frankly: and contrariwise, by the meane of a pinne, running into a post (which that religious imposter standing out of sight, could put in, and pull out, at his pleasure) it was, to such as offered faintly, so fast and unmoveable, that no force of hande might once stirre it. In so much, as many times it mooved more laughter than devotion, to beholde a great lubber to lift at that in vaine, which a young boy (or wench) had easily taken up before him.” Lambarde, W., A Perambulation of Kent: Description, Hystorie, and Customes of That Shire. Written in the Yeere 1570 (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1826), 209-10. 26 Marshall, P., (2003), 54. 27 Marshall, P., (2003), 58; Wyse, N., A Consolacyon for Chrysten People to Repayre Agayn the Lordes Temple (London, 1538). 28 Marshall, P., (2003), 59. This rood, as well as the intriguingly-named “jugling casts” of St. Erth in Cornwall, appear in the 1538-39 ballad The Fantasie of Idolatrie by William Gray. 29 Burckhardt, J., The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 13-14. 30 In this instance, this mechanical manipulation was ultimately confessed, as was the fact that she was the prior‟s lover; Marshall, P., (2003), 46; More, T., A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, ed. Lawler, T. M. C., et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 87-8. 31 This object was exposed by Bishop Barlow of St. Davids in 1538; Marshall, P., (2003), 55. 32 Bernard, G. W., (1998), 347. 33 See Aston, M., (2002), 253-56.

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34 “A Moving Tale from County Cork,” BBC News, 29 March 2000. 35 For example, the sweating cedar-wood Orpheus statue of Macedonian Liebethra, believed to be of the archaic small and portable variety, which sweated before Alexander the Great‟s departure; whereas the Juno Sospita‟s weeping was announced by the pontifex at Lanuvium in 181 B.C. Bremmer, J., “The Agency of Greek and Roman Statues: From Homer to Constantine,” Opuscula 6 (2013): 7-21, 13. Weeping, sweating, and bleeding statues have also been located in Heliopolis (modern Baalbek, Lebanon). See Cohen, J., (1966), 19. 36 Marshall, P., (2003), 49, 62, 65. 37 Marshall, P., (2003), 58-9. 38 Marshall, P., (2003), 60; Pylbarough, P., A commemoration of the inestimable graces and benefites of God, infused through the bryght lyght of the knowledge of his holy word, in our most dradde soueraigne lorde Henry the eyght, by the grace of God kyng of Englande and of Fraunce, defender of the faith, lorde of Irelande, and in erth the supreme heed next and immediate vnder Christe of the Churche of Englande, with hartye prayse and thankes gyuyng vnto God for the same (London: T. Berthelet, 1540). 39 Marshall, P., (2003), 61. 40 Marshall, P., (2003), 68. 41 Calendar of Letters, Despatches, and State Papers, Relating to the Negotiations between England and Spain… 1547-49, ed. Hume, M., and Tyler, R. (London, 1912), 219-20; see also Aston, M., (2002), 258. 42 Marshall, P., (2003), 72. 43 French, P., (1972), 60. while he resided at Mortlake and conducted an informal “academy” in the mold of the Platonic academy in Florence a century prior. 44 See French, John Dee, 83-5. 45 Other components to the experience resemble mediumistic phenomena, proscribed symbolic visions, and even a technique to obtain them, such as the “evocation of light,” which involved staring at a lamp, closing the eyes, reopening them, praying, and repeating or, alternately, staring for a long time at a white painted with magical symbols. Luck, G., (1989), 196, 202. 46 See in particular Borelli, A., “The Weatherglass and its Observers in the Early Seventeenth Century,” Philosophies of Technology: Francis Bacon and His Contemporaries, eds. Zittel C. et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 67-130. 47 French points to the capability of the Renaissance magus to produce amazing mechanical operations through mechanical expertise to refute the assumption that Dee‟s brand of mystical mathematicism did not lead to any useful results. French, P., (1972), 107-8; cf. F. W. Strong, Procedures and Metaphysics (Berkeley: University of California, 1936), 204 ff. 48 Dee, J., The Mathematicall Preface to elements of geometrie of the most auncient philosopher Euclide of Megara. Faithfully translated into the Englishe toung, by H. Billingsley, citizen of London.... With a very fruitfull praeface made by M. I. Dee, specifying the chiefe mathematicall scie[n]ces, what they are, and whereunto commodious (London: John Daye, 1570); see also French, P., (1972), 104. The manufacture of moving statues falls within Dee‟ s nomenclature “Thaumaturgike.” This field is included within Dee‟s work‟s list of every other contemporary scientific field in the Preface. Dee defines it as “that Art Mathematicall, which giveth certaine order to make straunge works, of the sense to be perceived, and to men to be greatly wondered at.” Dee, The Mathematicall Preface; quoted in French, John Dee, 109. Dee‟s “Thaumaturgike” does not make distinctions, between moving objects which depended on air, water, weights, strings, or springs to achieve their motion with or without direct human operation. 49 Diary of Baron Waldstein, trans. G. W. Roos (London, 1981), 164-66; reproduced in Strong, R., “Sir Francis Carew‟s garden at Beddington” in England and the continental Renaissance: essays in honour of J. B. Trapp, eds. E. Chaney and P. Mack (1990), 232.

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50 From a letter by a gentleman in the train of the Landgrave of Hesse in 1611 reproduced in Strong, R., (1990), 233. 51 Strong, R., (1990), 235-37. 52 This widely-imitated villa was the gold standard for its numerous grottoes and automata, and parallel developments constructed shortly afterwards in France at Saint-Germain-en-Laye set the bar for those who would aspire to realize anything similar in scope or scale. See in particular Zangheri, L., I giardini d'Europa: una mappa della fortuna medicea nel XVI e XVII secolo in Il Giardino d'Europa: Pratolino come modello nella cultura europea, ed. Centro Mostre di Firenze (Firenze: Mazzotta, 1986), 82-92. On the connection between Pratolino‟s automata and Renaissance magical philosophy, see Filson, L., Magical and Mechanical Evidence: The Late- Renaissance Automata of Francesco I de’ Medici in International Archive of Ideas, eds. J. Lancaster and R. Raiswell (Dordrecht: Springer, 2018), 177-208. 53 Strong, R., (1989), 87. 54 Strong dates this shift to the arrival of the sculptor Hubert le Sueur, who brought first-hand knowledge of the achievements of the Italian Renaissance with him. Strong, R., (1989), 136. 55 These and other features of Theobalds as it was in 1600 are documented by the Moravian nobleman Baron Waldstein. Other Elizabethan gardens noted for their earth- and water-works have been identified at Hampton Court (1530‟s), Elvetham (Hampshire) on the occasion of a 1591 queen‟s entertainment, and at Holdenby documented by Ralph Treswell‟s survey of 1587. Later examples of water gardens are those of Raglan Castle, Lyveden New Bield, Tackley, and Bindon Abbey. See Henderson, P., “Sir Francis Bacon‟s Water Gardens at Gorhambury,” Garden History 20 (1992): 116-131; 117-18, 129. 56 The phenomenon has been summarized as “a process of assimilation in one gigantic stride of the whole of what the mainland of Europe had achieved in the preceding century.” Henderson, P., (1992), 129. 57 Strong, R. (1989), 215. 58 W. H, The Trve Picture and Relation of Prince Henry… (Leiden, 1634), 31. Regarding Francesco I, the Venetian ambassador Andrea Gussoni in 1576 remembers that Francesco “arrived there early in the morning and left late at night, sometimes even carrying on government business” so as not to lose time from his studies.. (and) worked at this, then that artefice, always making some experience, and many things of his own hand.” Berti, L., Il Principe dello Studiolo: Francesco I dei Medici e la fine del Rinascimento fiorentino (Firenze: Maschietto & Musolino, 2002), 94. As for Rudolph II in Prague, we have the breathless letter from 1609 of a Florentine ambassador describing the identical penchant” “For he himself tries alchemical experiments, and he himself is busily engaged in making clocks, which is against the decorum of a prince. He has transferred his seat from the imperial throne to the workshop stool!” Godwin, J., The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 124. 59 Kennedy, M., “The pretend gardener: student discovers hidden life of Renaissance spy,” The Guardian, December 26, 2016. Accessed June 19 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/dec/26/cambridge-student-discovers- hidden-life-renaissance-spy. 60 The Guardian has published the image of this complete work; see the link in the footnote above. 61 Berti, L., (2002), 94. 62 Berti, L., (2002), 88-9; Morgan, L., The Monster in the Garden: The Grotesque and the Gigantic in Renaissance Landscape Designs (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 121. Giambologna‟s direct influence upon the court of Prince Henry also exerted itself with the arrival of small bronze statuettes, the first of their kind in England, executed by the master

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sculptor himself as well as by Pietro Tacca assisted by Antonio Susini. See Strong, R., (1989), 195. 63 Strong, R., (1989), 92; De‟ Servi to Cioli, Richmond 16 August 1611, ASF Mediceo 1348, f. 194. 64 Strong, R., (1989), 91, 93; De‟ Servi to Cioli, 9 June 1611 and 23 June 1611, ASF 4189; De‟ Servi to Cioli, 22 September 1611, ASF Mediceo 1348, f. 233. 65 Strong, R., (1989), 88, 95-6. Per the Duke of Savoy‟s account, “The festivities turned out differently from people‟s expectations and the great preparations, they say, through the shortcomings of the architect, a Florentine who was in the service of the late prince. He has disgraced himself, if truth be told, and mis-spent much of these gentlemen‟s money…” Orrell, J., “The agent of Savoy at The Somerset Masque,” Review of English Studies, 28 (1977): 301-4. 66 Strong, R., (1989), 106. 67 The Pratolino Cupid however is known to have rotated, directing the spray of water wherever its bow pointed. The De Caus putto, in contrast, appears at least in the engraving to have been intended as a more static arrangement of the theme. 68 Strong, R., (1989), 108. 69 The same similitude can be observed between a page pouring water from a pitcher in an engraving of De Caus and the one seen in a view of one of Pratolino‟s grottoes. 70 Henderson, P., (1992), 120, fig. 1. That is not to say that the Hatfield stick figures, whatever they were, were ever constructed, as financial difficulties and Cecil‟s death in 1612 ended his grandiose vision. 71 Henderson, P., (1992),; see also Strong, R., (1990), 223. 72 Other men in Henry‟s court as well as its orbit also anticipated this Florentine wave which carried with it the secret of bringing statues to life. Sir Henry Fanshaw, together with Sir John Danvers, have been recognized for their instrumental role in introducing Italian uses of water and sculpture to the English garden. See Strong, Henry Prince of Wales, 27; for the former, Memoirs of Lady Fanshawer… (London, 1829). 73 “The figures of the Ponds were thus; they were pitched at the bottomes with pebbles of severall colours, which were work‟d in to severall figures, as of Fishes, etc. which in his Lordship‟s time were plainly to be seen through the cleare water, now over-grown with flagges and rushes.” Bodleian Aubr. MS. 6, fol. 74r; reproduced in Henderson, P., (1992), 122. 74 These were recounted by Charlotte Grimston in her 1821 history of the site, “The ponds were so completely dry in the remarkably hot summer of 1802 that I had an opportunity of endeavoring to discover if any traces could be found of the Tessalated pavements Mr. Aubrey mentions, but I could not find the smallest remain of them, and only slight traces of the foundations of the banqueting house.” Charlotte Grimston, The History of Gorhambury (London, 1821), 56; reproduced in Henderson, P., (1992), 124. 75 Henderson, P., (1992), 127. 76 See Jones, M., “Theatrical History in the Croxton „Play of the Sacrament,‟” ELH 66 (1999): 223-260; Astington, J., “Descent Machinery in the Playhouses,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 2 (1985): 119-133. 77 Paxson, J. J., “Theorizing the Mysteries‟ End in England, the Artificial Demonic, and the Sixteenth-Century Witch-Craze,” Criticism 39 (1997): 481-502; 481. 78 Strong, R. (1989), 138. 79 Strong, R. (1989), 150. 80 Strong, R. (1989), 142. 81 Strong, R. (1989), 156-7. 82 Strong, R. (1989), 170.

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83 Orgel, S. and Strong, R., Inigo Jones: Theatre of the Stuart Court (London: Sotheby Park Bernet, 1973), I, 261; II, 595-603. 84 Campion, T., The description, speeches and songs, of the Lords’ Masque, presented in the banqueting-house on the marriage night of the high and mighty Count Palatine and the royally descended the Lady Elizabeth in English Masques, ed. Herbert Arthur Evans (New York: Scribner‟s Sons, 1898), 72-87; see also Orgel, S. and Strong, R., (1973), I, 241-52. 85 The interlocutor Prometheus announced their appearance: “…View these heav‟n-born stars, Who by my stealth are become sublunars ; How well their native beauties fit this place, Which with a choral dance they first shall grace ; Then shall their forms to human figures turn, And these bright fires within their bosoms burn. Orpheus, apply thy music, for it well, Helps to induce a courtly miracle.” Campion, T., (1898), 77. 86“According to the humour of this song, the stars moved in an exceeding strange and delightful manner, and I suppose few have ever seen more neat artifice than Master Inigo Jones shewed in contriving their motion, who in all the rest of the workmanship which belonged to the whole invention shewed extraordinary industry and skill, which if it be not as lively exprest in writing as it appeared in view, rob him not of his due, but lay the blame on my want of right apprehending his instructions for the adorning of his art.” Campion, T., (1898), 78. 87 Tymme, T., A Dialogue Philosophicall (London, 1612), 33. 88 Campion, T., (1898), 80. 89 Strong, R. (1989), 212; Hill, C., Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 213-19. 90 Strong, R. (1989), 108. 91 On water as the life-soul of the late-Renaissance garden, see Tchikine, A., “'L'anima del giardino': Water, Gardens, and Hydraulics in Sixteenth-Century Florence and Naples.” in Technology and the Garden, eds. M. G. Lee and K. I. Helphand (Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2014), 129-155. 92 See Tymme‟s wrestling with distinctions of soul, spirit, pneuma, psyche, air, and wind; Tymme, T., (1612), 39-42.