Staged on 1 May 1604, A Private Entertainment at Highgate inaugurates the series of aristocratic entertainments which parallel the court masque commissions. Highgate, however, differs from the Cecil entertainments in the nature of its occasion (‘private’) and in its patronage contexts. The host, Sir William Cornwallis (c. 1549–1611) had been a minor figure at the Elizabethan court and, apart from the convenience of his Highgate house for hunting, had little to offer the new regime. Moreover, he was either a recusant, or had close connections with recusant circles (his sister, Elizabeth, Lady Kytson, was Catholic, as was one of his wives and his daughter Anne). Martin Peerson, who provided the music for this occasion and who was also associated with the Children of the Queen’s Revels, was indicted alongside Jonson for Catholicism at the Old Bailey on 9 January 1606 (Life Records, 31). Although much of the tone of the entertainment is playful and coloured by bawdy satire, shared musical or religious networks may underlie the entertainment.

Sir William’s political connections are uncertain. His father – who was still alive at the time of A Private Entertainment at Highgate – had been Mary I’s comptroller of the household. But despite clientage and marital links with the Howards, and the Earls of Oxford, Worcester, and Northumberland, Sir William’s court career had not flourished and much of his time was spent at Brome Hall, Suffolk. He claimed to have lost £20,000 in royal service, and left the court in 1591 in ‘a foolish fit of discontent’ (Hasler, 1981, 1.659).

Despite this self-imposed exile, by the early 1600s he was seeking court office once again, trading heavily on his links to the Cecils, through his sister-in-law, Dorothy Neville, who had married the Earl of Exeter, Robert Cecil’s older brother (Weikel, 1996–7, 21). In 1603 he lobbied unsuccessfully to become emissary to Venice, describing his estate as ‘shrunken and shaken with so many years’ service to a prince utterly without reward’ (Hasler, 1.659). In 1605 he claimed to be too poor for court service. This statement may have masked a desire to attach himself to Queen Anne, perhaps encouraged by their shared religious sympathies: he pleaded ‘so that I may be about her Majesty, I care not to be a groom of the scullery’. Queen Anne dined with him as late as 1611 (SP14/63/33). He has been described as ‘loving, honest, [and] kind’ but also as ‘utterly ineffectual’ (Heal and Holmes, 1999, 106).

Although Cornwallis died with debts of about £4,000, he left his second wife, Jane (Meautys) Cornwallis, whom he married in 1609, with a substantial inheritance of over £500 a year and control over many of his estates, including the wardship of their son (Heal and Holmes, 1999, 106–7). While this marriage post-dates the Highgate entertainment, the protracted legal suits with the Cornwallis family that followed illuminate earlier tensions. In 1604 on the death of his father Sir Thomas Cornwallis, Sir William had already attempted to break the entail that guaranteed the inheritance of his brother, Sir Charles Cornwallis (d. 1629). These conflicts may have stemmed from Sir William’s erroneous belief that Sir Charles had been responsible for the fatal accident that befell his first son in 1593, and the fact that Sir Charles had successfully gained court office (Hasler, 1981, 1.169; Heal and Holmes, 1999, 106–10). Sir Charles Cornwallis had broken with the family’s beliefs, and became ambassador to Spain (1605–9), then treasurer to Prince Henry. In these circumstances it is especially ironic that Sir Charles’s son, the essayist Sir William Cornwallis, the younger (see ODNB), is often confused with his uncle.

The Cornwallis estates were substantial. In addition to extensive lands in Suffolk, Cornwallis owned several important London properties, including an estate in Kensington (sold in 1611), Fisher’s Folly (‘a large and beautiful house with gardens of pleasure’), and the house in Highgate (Lysons, 1792–6, 3.173). Norden (1593), D3v, called the last ‘a very faire house, from which [Sir William] may with great delight behold the stately City of London, Westminster, Greenwich, the famous River Thames, the country towards the south very far’. The gardens extended to over ten acres. In 1610 the house passed to the Earl of Arundel, and later accounts mention a gallery, lamprey ponds, and garden walks. John Evelyn’s description of the renamed Arundel House as a ‘darling villa’ strongly suggests the sophisticated retreats from urban life which were a feature of Florentine life, and which English aristocrats began to imitate (Hervey, 1921, 90, 97; Howarth, 1985, 63; Strong, 1979, 14–17). The house was regularly used for hunting, especially by Prince Henry, and in 1617 Lady Arundel held an ‘Italian’ feast there (CSPD 1611–18, 473). The location had symbolic associations with Maying and, as a major entry point into the city, straddling the Great North Road, it had historic links: Elizabeth I was supposed to have met her council and bishops for the first time in Cornwallis House. Geographical proximity to London made it a usefully discreet place for semi-licit activities: in 1609 the Spanish ambassador held mass in Highgate, probably at Cornwallis House (Loomie, 1973, 1.150–2).

Cornwallis was a sophisticated musical and cultural patron, employing the singer Robert Hales, who was later appointed to the household of Anne of Denmark; Robert Sprignall, later a singing man at St George’s Chapel, Windsor; and the madrigalist John Wilbye, who later joined the Kytsons, at Hengrave Hall in Suffolk. Although his other cultural connections are rather elusive, it seems he belonged to a significant East Anglian coterie of largely Catholic patrons, including the Kytsons, the Hobarts of Blickling Hall, Norfolk (who also had a house in Highgate), and the Petres of Ingatestone Hall, Essex. Sir Thomas Cornwallis was an important book collector, and his letters to Sir John Hobart (d. 1613) reveal sophisticated interests in Latin continental writing, including the work of Lipsius (Scott-Warren, 2000, 293–5). Furthermore, the recusant poet and musician Thomas Watson had been tutor to Sir William’s son from about 1588 (ODNB). These East Anglian, recusant, musical, and literary connections are all seen in the Cornwallis-Lysons MS, which belonged to William’s daughter Anne (m. 1610, Archibald, seventh Earl of Argyll, also later a recusant), and contains poetry by Raleigh, Dyer, and the Earl of Oxford (ODNB; Worthington, 2004, 57–62; Woodhuysen, 1996, 257–9; Kelliher, 1990; Bond, 1948, 683–93).

A Private Entertainment at Highgate reshapes the conventions of Elizabethan pastoral shows for the new joint monarchy of England and Scotland, providing a two-part occasion around a dinner, the first developing from May Day customs, and the second, centred on a magic fountain, being a more jocular and intimate round of convivial drinking and toasts offered by the rustic god Pan. The first half recalls Elizabethan progresses, citing ‘Orian’, Elizabeth’s poetic name, while the gathering birds echo the return of spring celebrated at the late Queen’s visit (77–97n.). The echoes may be conscious, as Elizabeth had visited Highgate in 1589, 1593, 1594, and 1597, and in 1601 had gone maying there, probably at Cornwallis House (Chambers, ES, 4.104, 108, 111, 113), a visit which was perhaps the occasion for Thomas Morley’s Triumphs of Oriana (Fellowes, 1967, 698). The second half, playing on the standard pun that linked satyrs and satire, provides more salacious amusement, more in tune with the relaxed atmosphere of the Jacobean court, joking about Danish drinking and James’s penchant for hunting, and making mildly suggestive remarks to the royal entourage. Its central conceit, the magical and reviving fountain that flows as the monarch approaches, might have appealed to Queen Anne’s taste for gardening, but also provides a comic foil to the seasonal renewal celebrated in the first half, echoing the new regime’s images of renovatio.

The May Day occasion has complex resonances. As the centre of the spring ritual calendar, the feast of St James and St Philip the Less was significantly a festival for both the Catholic and Protestant churches (Hutton, 1994, 27–30). Maying itself was more generally associated in the protestant mind with licentiousness, as the gathering of green branches from the forest to decorate the house – the main May Day custom – was a fertility symbol (Blackburn and Holford-Strevens, 1999, 185). James I, however, had already publicly approved of Maying as an ‘honest game’ (Basilikon Doron, 1603, 27). Thus, in line with the already-declared Jacobean policy of supporting ‘lawful games’, Jonson celebrates a festival for both religious parts of the nation while also resisting protestant calls for the abolition of such customs (Marcus, 1986, 151–66).

Jonson’s invocation of May has further and very particular significance, as A Private Entertainment at Highgate also recalls one of the main texts of Elizabethan pastoral, Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar, and especially the ‘May’ eclogue. Highgate rewrites Spenser’s text for a changed political and religious context. This eclogue had combined pastoral praise of ‘Eliza’ alongside a satirical attack on popish uses of popular festivals, openly advocating the views of the strict protestant Archbishop Grindal. Instead, echoing Spenser’s combination of pastoral and satire, Jonson takes elements from this famous description of May and celebrates the ‘holiday’ (154) not as symbol of controversy but as an occasion of religious harmony. The text repeats the term ‘grace’ (7, 41), stressing the prayerful devotion of the Cornwallis household to the new monarchs, and the image of shared prayers suggests the kind of religious toleration that marked early Jacobean religious policy. Indeed, in 1603–4, there were rumours that full toleration might be possible, and the Cornwallis entertainment provides a poetic manifesto for it, connecting natural and communal harmony, and the proper obedience of royal policy. Beneath their satiric surface, the shared healths suggest the opportunity for national unity.

The setting of Highgate is crucial to these inferences, providing an informal and suitably differentiated location, neither quite court, city, nor country, that facilitates the insinuation of potentially controversial views. The occasion’s double aspect, combining pastoral and satire, also articulates the text’s more ‘tolerationist’ ethic, by licensing such views as part of either the cultural or generic expectations of place and occasion. Although Pan provides a comic counterpoint to the mythic and poetic seriousness of the pre-dinner entertainment, his role is not entirely that of the ‘puckish god of laughter and liquor’ (Butler, 1992, 372). His fountain suggests the possibilities of renewal and spiritual change offered by the new Jacobean monarchy. Clearly not the Orphic Pan alluded to in Spenser’s ‘May’ eclogue (Spenser, 1989, line 54) and in the Althorp Entertainment, his ‘rustic impudence’ (163) generates the laughter and conviviality that feeds social harmony. The fountain may ‘expel sadness’ (169), but Pan’s comedy has a serious purpose. Thus the entertainment closes with Mercury’s ‘divinations’ (239), prophecies of long life, fertility, and loyal service, particularly of the Catholic community who offer the King and Queen this entertainment.

The only surviving text of the entertainment is in F1. The song, ‘See, see, oh, see’, also appeared in Martin Peerson’s Private Music, or the First Book of Airs and Dialogues (1620).