Staged on  9 January 1631, Love’s Triumph Through Callipolis recasts Roman imper- ial imagery for the Caroline monarchy: Charles, the triumphator, appears as the ‘heroical’ Lover (95) rather than in more martial guise, and the procession enters Callipolis, the ‘City of Beauty or Goodness’ (12). One of the masque’s key oppositions is between the disordered ‘suburbs or skirts’ of the city, disturbed by sectaries and ‘ depraved lovers’, and the garden surmounted by a ‘new asterism’ (148), symbolizing the reform of the state enacted through the King’s influence and his devotion to Henrietta Maria, depicted as Divine Beauty. In line with other Caroline masques ‘transcendence has been won not by military but by moral conquest’, self-discipline rather than military discipline(Peacock, 2006, 55, 65). The moral reformation that leads to this triumph is personal, marital, and national.

The domestic reformation staged in Love’s Triumph can be seen in the allusions to Caroline royal policy. In the masque, Callipolis is purged of its ‘perturbations’ and ‘infection’ (65) by Heroical Love in a process that echoes the King’s own efforts to control London’s growth and to encourage the city’s re-edification in a suitable form (Butler, 1993, 130–2). Later proclamations attempted to control the seasonal fluctuation in London’s population and bring the unregulated industries and populations of the suburbs under civic governance, while Inigo Jones oversaw a building commission that sought to raise construction standards (Larkin and Hughes, 1983 , 2.20–6, 281–7; 2.12–13, 170–2, 350–3; 2.576–80). Alongside these regulatory measures ran a programme of aesthetic improvement, such as the development of Covent Garden, led by the Earl of Bedford and, in part, designed by Jones. Here the purgation takes on intensely religious aspects, as the city is exorcised in an elaborate ‘lustration’ (71) that echoes current Laudian elaborations of church ritual. The timing of the masque for Twelfth Night provides a suitable prompt for the images of national renewal that fill the text (Butler, 1996, 80–1). In particular, the antimasque imagines the new, unified nation (conjured up by ‘Britain’s Genius’, 178), created by the expulsion of the fantastics from the ‘four prime European nations’ (21), and the enumeration of the constituent elements of new British manliness in the fifteen Lovers(92–8).

The concerns of Love’s Triumph are not solely domestic as the masque followed closely on the signing of two treaties, Susa with France (1629) and Madrid with Spain (1630), that marked the nearly bankrupt nation’s withdrawal from continental war. The connection between the purgation of domestic disorder and the ability to fight a war was made by one commentator on the 1629 parliament’s failure to grant sufficient revenue for military operations: ‘it is to be hoped [ the King] will think no more on war until he have his people in better order’ (Sharpe, 1992, 65). Although Charles is generally depicted as ‘Rex Pacificus’, his earlier years were markedly bellicose, fuelled largely by his continued ‘wonderfully good affection to the cause’ of the restoration of the Palatinate to his sister Elizabeth of Bohemia and her husband (Sanders and Atherton, 2006, 3; Cogswell, 1989, 58). Trapped, in part, by skilful Spanish diplomatic manoeuv- ring, Charles not only signed the Treaty of Madrid which rendered England a ‘non-combatant satellite of Spain’, and failed to gain restitution of the Palatinate, but agreed to the secret ‘Cottington’ Treaty (2 January 1631) that committed England to an anti-Dutch alliance (Reeve, 1989, 250–6). Given the highly controversial nature of even the public element of these negotiations it is unsurprising that the King characterized Love’s Triumph Through Callipolis as an apolitical occasion intended for the ‘Queen’s particular pleasure and satisfaction’ (Masque Archive, Love’s Tr., 1).

The contest between the French and Spanish ambassadors over the invitations and precedence (in the end neither attended) suggests that the manoeuvring around this masque extended the diplomatic struggles over Charles’s Hispanophile policy. Interestingly, most of the senior masquers (Doncaster, Hamilton, and Holland) were pro-French and associated with Henrietta Maria’s court, while Pembroke (Philip Herbert, formerly Earl of Montgomery, had succeeded his brother in 1630) was a noted strict Protestant. Another masquer, Lord Strange, was married to the French Hugenot, Charlotte de la Trémoille, the couple having met at the Elector Palatine’s residence in The Hague (Kmec, 2004, 2). The engagement of these mainly hostile courtiers in the masque may suggest that Charles sought to build allegiances with those discomforted by the Spanish treaties. Neptune’s prominent role may allude to the significance of Caroline naval policy, the one area where some sort of national pride was maintained, although the Spanish treaties even saw major reverses in this direction (Reeve, 1989, 256).

The emphasis upon personal regeneration and reformation through prayer rather than military action may mark an attempt to wrest the discourse of rectitude and spiritual reform from the Protestants. Viscount Dorchester, one of the staunchest supporters of the Palatine couple, described England as ‘this wicked land’ for acceding to the treaties, and saw the nation as ‘corrupted by the Spaniards’ (Reeve, 1989, 256 and 258). Thus the banishment of the overly passionate southern Europeans in the antimasque by the heroic and self-controlled English reclaims the language of regeneration, asserts that England has not become a Spanish lackey, and recasts English isolation as independence. The allusions to past naval power and triumphs may be designed to recollect Elizabethan images of maritime power (Strong, 1984, 161–2), and the masque’s fictional location, Callipolis, has distant Spenserian resonances. Interestingly, Sir Walter Ralegh’s son, Carew, danced among the masquers.

Recent reassessments of the political interventions in Henrietta Maria’s masques (Britland, 2000; Chloridia, Introduction) require a modification of the emphasis in the masques for Charles on the ‘exclusively . . . domestic politics’ and ‘tropes elaborating the contrast between shipwreck abroad and peace at home’ (Butler, 1993, 128). In particular, if, as Karen Britland has suggested, the appearance of Juno and the striking absence of Venus in Chloridia point to some ambivalences in the Queen’s political position, then the Venusian climax of Love’s Triumph might be read not only as a celebration of the refined but erotic desire found in the royal marriage but also as a marker of Charles’s political position. Venus was famously the mother of Aeneas and so, by implication, the Venusian intervention in the masque casts Charles not only as heroic lover but as progenitor of the New Trojans or Britons. Thus, significantly, the palm tree and imperial crown topped by the intertwined French and English lily and rose (172--2) replace the throne of Venus at the end. This theme of conquest through peace and the restatement of imperial ambitions through unity and strength may have been designed to signal the King’s continued allegiance to some form of continental and military intervention, even as he signed treaties that made such adventures unlikely.

The masque appeared in quarto in 1631, naming the  ‘Inventors’ as Jonson and Jones, a phrasing that became the subject of further dispute between the two masque-makers. It reinvigorated the long-standing dispute between Jonson and Jones over artistic primacy in the masque and led to Jonson’s rejection as the masque poet in 1632 (see Birch, 1848, 2.158–9, and Masque Archive, Love’s Tr., 10). It also led to the exchange of poetic invectives: Jonson’s ‘Expostulation with Inigo Jones’ and Jones’s reply (Literary Record, Electronic Edition). The key term in this dispute, ‘invention’ – a combination of the creation of the fable with the organization and execution of the masque’s overarching conception – was regarded by Jonson as the distinguishing feature of the poetic role. In Discoveries, he argued: ‘he is called a poet, not he which writeth in measure only, but that he feigneth and formeth a fable and writes things like the truth. For the fable and fiction is (as it were) the form and soul of any poetical work’ (Discoveries, 1668–71). Jonson often repeated his claim that poetic invention represented the ‘soul’ of the masque (notably in Hym., 5), and regarded the visual elements as simply mechanical adjuncts (see Gordon, 1975), an argument that may have been less sympathetically received in the visually-oriented Caroline court.

Further instances of the new cultural emphases of the Caroline court can be traced in the masque’s form. Although the Queen’s paired masque for 1631, Chloridia, was the first to use full-blown danced entries in homage to the ballet de entrées, the masquers of Love’s Trimph dance their ‘entry’ (121), while the ‘ distracted comedy of love’ (20), that replaces the spoken antimasque of the mid-Jacobean masque, may also gesture towards French ballets de cour, especially the burlesque ballets that gained popularity after 1620 (Britland, 2006, 4, 32–3). The ‘involved mazes’ (34) danced by the pantomimi to represent their ‘continued vertigo’ (17) belong to the masque’s contrast between the formal movement of the lustration and the disordered city (with its overly-permeable boundaries and perturbations that find echo in the monstrous lovers’ labyrinthine dances), and the music-filled ‘mazes’ (69) of the ear. The masque recalls Theseus and the Minotaur as the Chorus salutes the Heroic Lover, ‘Who had the power and virtue to remove / Such monsters from the labyrinth of love’ (85--6), a myth which in Caroline iconography paralleled St George and the dragon. Indeed, in 1629–30 Sir Peter Paul Rubens had painted Charles as St George in armour and garter insignia, rescuing Henrietta Maria from a dragon improbably, if symbolically, located in the Thames valley (Veevers, 1989, 187–91; Greene, 2001, 1455; Britland, 2006, 66; Butler, 2008, 151).

The different kinds of labyrinth in Love’s Triumph are worked into a ‘clever manipulation of circular motifs’ through which the country is rendered impermeable by binding and purification (Britland, 2006, 67). The circular imagery associated with the Queen (the ‘centre of proportion’, 110) and the mutual royal love (‘The circle of the will / Is the true sphere of Love’, 117-18) transforms the vertiginous movements of the labyrinth into the ‘just perfections’ danced by the Cupids (120). This ordered movement echoes the moment in Orphic mythography when Love overcame Chaos and generated the circular motion or ‘dance’ of the cosmos, a myth already deployed by Jonson in Beauty, 257–64 (Greene, 2001, 1440, 1448–52). So, here, labyrinth becomes circle and ‘Love, emergent out of chaos, brought / The world to light!’ (127--8). The implication is that the masque performs an act of cosmogenesis as primordial as the original ordering of the universe.

Love’s Triumph Through Callipolis was printed in quarto in 1631. This survives in two states, and was reprinted unrevised in F2; our edition is based on the quarto. Inigo Jones’s design for Venus’s throne survives, as do thirteen costume designs for the antimasque characters, several of which are based on zanies and women from the engraved series Balli di Sfessania (c. 1622) by Jacques Callot; a selection is reproduced here as Illustrations 100–105 (see also Orgel and Strong, 1.404–15). No music for the masque is known.