THE CHAPEL AND THE CHAMBER: CEREMONIAL DINING AND RELIGIOUS RITUAL AT THE COURT OF KING CHARLES I BY NILE KAHLI BLUNT DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2011 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Emeritus Caroline Hibbard, Chair Associate Professor Craig Koslofsky Associate Professor Lisa Rosenthal Associate Professor Carol Symes Professor R. Malcolm Smuts, University of Massachusetts Boston ABSTRACT This dissertation explores the ritual behavior and material culture associated with ceremonial dining at the court of King Charles I of England (b.1600 – d.1649). Employing archival sources that have heretofore been underutilized by historians of seventeenth-century England, this study reconstructs the king’s dining ceremonies and situates them within the broader context of the political, religious and cultural milieus of the court. The first chapter examines King Charles’s personal religious preferences, as exemplified by his English and Scottish coronations. Illuminating his religious convictions and exploring his fervent attachment to the Beauty of Holiness helps to reveal the material and ritual congruencies between dining ceremonies and religious rituals. The following chapter reconstructs these dining ceremonies and places them in the context of the ritual life of the court, while also charting the complex system of provisioning food for the royal household. This chapter illuminates how these ceremonies revived older modes of ritual kingship and aided the king in presenting a particular vision of his rule that was characterized by the conflation of the secular and the sacred. The following chapter explores the various roles of silver plate at court including its place in the material culture of dining and religious worship. The final chapter presents the Order of the Garter as a “case study” for the confluence of dining and religious ritual at court. The Garter Feast and Charles’ relationship to it help to demonstrate the sacral tone of his kingship as well as the “antique magnificence” that he promulgated. Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates the ways in which dining ceremonies served as an expression of the core ideals of the kingship of Charles I. ii For my parents iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Although research and writing can be very solitary exercises, there are many people who deserve credit for my completion of this dissertation. First amongst them are my parents, Richard and Shelania, who long ago instilled in me the confidence, determination and faith that it took to complete my studies and write this dissertation. Their unfaltering and unconditional support, encouragement and love have always been and always will be cherished gifts. I also owe a great debt of gratitude to Professor Caroline Hibbard, whose guidance, patience and wisdom have been invaluable to me. Professor Hibbard’s excellence as a scholar and a teacher will be an inspiration to me for years to come. I have been thinking and writing about the topic of royal dining since my first year of graduate study in 2004. Since then my ideas and approaches have benefited from excellent advice and helpful critiques. My experiences at two scholarly conferences were fundamental to the development of my topic. I presented versions of the key chapter of this dissertation, the chapter on royal dining, in 2007 and in 2011. The contributions of the moderator, audience and my co-panelists at the North East Conference on British Studies in Halifax, Nova Scotia helped to shape this topic while it was still in its infancy in 2007. Four years later, the feedback that I received at the Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque Symposium at the University of Miami helped to finalize key aspects of this chapter in the form that it takes today. Moreover, I am grateful the members of the Early Europe Reading Group at the University of Illinois for their useful and well-considered suggestions for the chapters on religion and the Order of the Garter. iv Research for this project happened in three stages, each of which was funded in part by the History Department of the University of Illinois. The first stage of preliminary research occurred in the winter of 2007. This was followed by a second stage of exploratory research during the summer of the same year. The final more in-depth research stage took place over several months in the fall, winter and spring of 2008/2009. There are a number of people who helped to make each stage of my research a fruitful and pleasant experience. These people include the librarians, archivists and members of staff at the National Archives of the United Kingdom, the British Library, the National Art Library and The Somerset County Record Office. I am particularly grateful to Stephanie Seavers of the Metalworks Department at the Victoria and Albert Museum for her assistance and advice. Furthermore, I am much obliged to the Towers family of Kew, Surrey for their hospitality during my long research trip. I would also like to offer my gratitude to the members of my dissertation committee: Professors Craig Koslofsky, Carol Symes, Lisa Rosenthal and Malcolm Smuts, whose insights, suggestions and critiques were invaluable at every stage of my writing and revision process. I am particularly indebted to Professor Smuts, whose pioneering work in this field helped to make a dissertation on this topic even possible. I am also grateful for my association with the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH). The IPRH fellowship allowed me the freedom to focus on my writing and complete my dissertation and I am honored to have spent the final year of my graduate studies as an IPRH Fellow. Lastly, there are countless others, including my friends and colleagues at the University of Illinois, who cannot each be named here, but nonetheless deserve acknowledgement and my sincerest thanks. v ABBREVIATIONS The Following list indicates abbreviations used for manuscript and printed primary sources and reference works. AO Records of the Auditors of the Imprest, The National Archives, London BL The British Library CSPD Calendar of State Papers, Domestic. Edited by M.A.E. Green, John Bruce, et al. Vols. 1-18 (1625 – 1643). London: 1857 – 1897. CSPV Calendar of State Papers, Venetian. Edited by H.F. Brown and A.B. Hinds. Vols. 19-25 (1625-1642). London: 1913-1925. DD/MI Mildmay Family Muniments, Somerset County Record Office, Taunton E Office of the Exchequer, The National Archives, London LC Lord Chamberlain’s Department, The National Archives, London LR Office of the Auditors of the Land Revenue, The National Archives, London LS Lord Steward’s Department, The National Archives, London ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. SP State Papers, The National Archives, London vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………..…1 CHAPTER 1: “VISIBLE SIGNS OF INVISIBLE GRACES”: THE PIETY AND RELIGIOUS PRACTICE OF KING CHARLES I……………………………………...21 CHAPTER 2: THE LITURGY OF THE BOARD: DINING AT THE COURT OF KING CHARLES I…………………………………………………………………..60 CHAPTER 3: EXQUISITE ADJUNCTS OF RANK: SILVERWORK AND THE ROYAL HOUSEHOLD…………………………………………………………………93 CHAPTER 4: “A SPECTACULAR LITURGY OF STATE”: KING CHARLES I AND THE ORDER OF THE GARTER……………………………………………......124 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………....152 APPENDIX: A NOTE ON THE MANNER OF THE CORONATION OF CHARLES I AND THE HENRY BRADSHAW SOCIETY…………………………………………162 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………165 vii Introduction Interest in the history of the English royal courts is relatively recent. In the year 2000, David Starkey observed that, unlike other overly historicized phenomena, the plight of the court is that it has suffered from too little attention, not too much. Unlike a number of other social and political institutions, the history of the royal courts needs writing, not rewriting.1 While the scholarship on the seventeenth-century court of King Charles I of England is still in need of expansion, a number of important essays, articles and monographs have been published in the last three decades, which have helped us to rethink the cultural, political, and religious significance of the Caroline court and its activities. Although the culture of the court had not been offered a proper political context until at least the 1990s, the court itself has stood at the center of nearly every historiographic dispute about the political history of early modern England over the past half-century.2 In the 1960s and 70s, as they searched for the causes of the English Civil War, historians began viewing the English polity in terms of a diametrical opposition between the “court and country.” This dichotomy was used, again and again, to characterize the social, cultural, political and religious split that eventually led to the 1 David Starkey, “Foreword” in The Stuart Courts, edited by Eveline Cruickshanks (Stroud, UK : Sutton, 2000.), xii. Courts have, of course, received some attention. For discussion of European courts in general see: R.G. Asch’s “Introduction: Court and Household from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries” in Princes, Patronage and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age c 1450 – 1650, eds R.G. Asch and A.M. Birke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) and John Adamson’s “The Making of the Ancien Régime Court 1500 – 1700” in The Princely Courts of Europe: Ritual, Politics and Culture under the Ancien Régime, 1500 – 1700, ed. John Adamson (Weidenfield and Nicholson: London, 1999). 2 Neil Cuddy “Reinventing a Monarchy: The Changing Structure and Political Function of the Stuart Court, 1603 – 1688” in The Stuart Courts, edited by Eveline Cruickshanks (London: Sutton Publishing, 2000), 60. Cuddy’s assertion may seem over stated, however when considering the predominance of the Whig interpretation of history and its purposeful de-emphasis of the court and its significance, it becomes clear that the court, one way or another, has been at the heart of the historiography.