On the death of James VI and I on 27 March 1625, plans were made for the ‘greatest’ funeral ‘that was ever known in England’ (Chamberlain, 1939, 2.616) – featuring a magnificent catafalque by Inigo Jones (Harris and Higgott, 1989, 186–7) – to be followed by a ceremonial welcome for the new king’s bride, a royal marriage, and the coronation and its associated procession through London. The proxy marriage of Charles and Henrietta Maria was celebrated in Paris on 1 May, but by the time the Queen arrived at Dover on 24 June and the marriage had taken place, a series of disagreements and problems had begun to engulf the coronation and its pageantry.

By mid-May 1625, a severe outbreak of plague was infecting London, and the Scots had begun to agitate for Charles to be crowned king of Scots too (CSPV 1625– 1626, 51). Subsequently, disputes arose about the Queen’s role in the ceremonies, the use of Protestant rites (Gardiner, 1875, 1.355) and – despite Bishop William Laud’s attempt to stage-manage the occasion – the nature of the coronation oath. But even these problems were dwarfed once the parlousness of the King’s financial situation became clear. Eventually Charles was crowned on 2 February 1626, without his Queen and ‘without the usual splendour’ (CSPV 1625–1626, 271). At first the planned procession was merely postponed to May – to allow for a Scots coronation, according to John Chamberlain (Middleton, 2007, 1899) – but then in July it was cancelled, ‘owing to the scarcity of money’ (CSPV 1625–1626, 464). The coronation had been greeted by bonfires and fireworks (CSPV 1625–1626, 322), but the cancellation of the procession wasted five ‘most superb arches’ and a great deal of money, much to the ‘disgust’ of those who had already paid for the pageants. The ‘murmurs’ of the people’ were perhaps exacerbated by the flimsy excuse that the arches were now obstructing the traffic (CSPV 1625–1626, 322, 464).

Jonson’s contribution to what the Earl of Pembroke called the ‘stately and sumptuous’ solemnization of the royal coronation was connected to the triumphal arch to be erected by the Dutch community based at the Dutch Church at Austin Friars (Bergeron, 1970, 92; Grell, 1996). This arch, sited in Gracechurch Street, belonged to a sequence of five through which the King would pass as he moved east to west through the City: two designed and built by the City of London and its guilds, and three to be provided by the ‘stranger’ communities. The Dutch, who had been heavily involved in the 1604 entry for King James (Hood, 1991; Grell, 1996, 163–74), were anxious to demonstrate their loyalty to the new king, and moved quickly to establish a planning committee. Led by the merchant and poet Jacob Cool, himself an authority on the Roman triumph (Grell, 165), the committee hired a creative team that included Jonson, the architect Bernard Jansen (who was partly responsible for Audley End), and the court painter Francis Cleyn. This group prepared the programme and a modello, and eventually constructed the full-scale arch (Grell, 175–8). While Jonson’s exact involvement is undefined, the team met frequently over dinner during May, June, and July 1625, presumably to thrash out the iconographic scheme, many elements of which echo Jonson’s other late Jacobean and Caroline works (such as the ‘Oceano secura meo’ tag coined in Underwood 82). It is not clear whether Jonson would have provided speeches to accompany the King’s inspection of the arch. The accounts include a book worth twelve shillings given to him in July; this may have been part of his reward but it might conceivably be connected to his invention of the scheme (Masque Archive, Royal Entry, 2).

A description of the arch survives in Cesar Calandrini and Emilius van Cuilemborgh’s manuscript history of the Dutch communities in England, detailing its basic structure and complex programme (Guildhall Library, London, MS 9621; Masque Archive, Royal Entry, 3). The front of the arch celebrates the joint inheritance of Charles and Henrietta Maria, who are depicted in a painting being united by the god Hymen and surrounded by angels, cherubs, and lilies and roses, the symbols of the two kingdoms. Hymen, with his hands crossed, offers a lily to the King and a rose to the Queen. The royal pair is flanked by figures of King James and Henri IV depicted, respectively, as a peacemaker and a heroic warrior. The two kings are supported by Minerva and Saron, and Mars and Vulcan, and flanked by Genius and Juno. The whole arch was topped by the figures of Britannia and Neptune, celebrating the English naval prowess, with the motto ‘Oceano secura meo’(‘secure in my seas’).

The iconography is unsurprising, as the explication in the manuscript account reveals:

It is a nice glorification of the marriage of the King in poetical terms, as one united by heaven by the service of angels, crowned with garlands and strewn with flowers of love, giving each his modest commendation – to the King, of justice and courage, and to the Queen, of sweetness – enriched by the accompanying representation of the highly famed monarchs, the fathers on both sides: King James, renowned for piety, peace, and great wisdom (symbolised by Minerva, the patron of knowledge, placed at his side, and Saron, the god of shipping tack, under her feet), and Henri le Grand, a militant hero (with Mars on his side, the patron of war, and Vulcan, to forge the weapons, under his feet). The Genius and Juno symbolise peace and wealth, which should flourish under this King. The image at the top is to the honour of Britannia, needing to fear no enemies, having the wide sea in her control. (Masque Archive, Royal Entry, 3; translated by Maartje Scheltens and Paul Hoftijzer)

The images echo many of the other celebrations of the marriage, notably the mixing of the lily and the rose found in French and English texts, and most recently prophesied in The Fortunate Isles (repeated in Love’s Tr., 171–2, Bolsover, 65–6, and Und. 65 and 82). The arch also utilizes the Virgilian allusion that depicts Britain as ‘toto divisios orbe Britannos’ (Virgil, Eclogues, 1.36; Bennett, 1956, 114; Britland, 2006, 19).

The rear imagery was more controversial:

Higher above this was another picture: Religio, represented by a maiden with wings, leaning on a cross, with an open book in her lap, and Death below her feet; above was written Summi filia patris [Martial, 11.4]. To the sides of the middle picture was a statue of Mercury with a sack of coins, [and] above his head was written Non regno; and one of Janus, and above him was written Indecorus. Underneath Mercury and Janus, were two statues of the Dii Penates. Above one was written Sacra suosque, tueri commendant; above the other raptos ex hoste penates Belg.

As Calandrini explains, the main figure was specifically ‘true Religion’, and the sequence of Virgilian allusions pointed up the significance of piety in the councils and laws of the nation ‘whereby the hours of our lives are spun out to a pious ending’. The appearance of Mercury and Janus reminds viewers of the ways in which ‘foreigners have enriched the country with manufacture’ (presumably pointing to the importance of trade with England’s co-religionists in the United Provinces), but the key point lies in the preservation of the Penates, ‘that . . . escaped persecution to preserve the true Religion’. In particular, the image of Aeneas as the son of his country rescuing the Penates (the two Latin phrases come from Aeneid, 1.378 and 2.293) represents the English as descendents of the Trojans, keepers of the true faith, and rescuers of the faith of Belgia (the Low Countries).

It is unsurprising that the Dutch arch should praise Charles as defensor fidei and successor to those who had defended Dutch Protestantism, but this set of images was especially charged and provocative in 1625–6. During her journey to England, Henrietta Maria had been greeted at Amiens with a series of pageants that stressed her potential role in the reconversion of England (Britland, 2006, 8–9), and her instructions from Marie de Medici and the hopes of the French court were that she would return Charles to Catholicism and promote an Anglo- French alliance against the Spanish. This project was alluded to in the tapestries displayed at her wedding in Notre Dame (described in the Mercure François but not in the English pamphlets), which depicted the triumph of Scipio over the Carthaginians, glossed as the victory of faith over apostasy (Britland, 2000, 37). On the arch, the removal of the Trojan Penates from the sack of Troy and from Carthage (and the blandishments of Dido), and the allusion to the destiny of pius Aeneas and his sons to found Rome and London, possibly respond to the French deployments of Virgil. Whereas in the French nuptial tapestry Carthage corresponded to Spain, in the Dutch ceremonial architecture Carthage represents France, and the apparently virtuous and noble Dido embodies the allurements of desire rather than the chastity of true religion. The overall emphasis here is the ‘continuance’ of true faith, recalling a past history of persecution as a warning against the superficial attractions of peace, prosperity, and plenty, which are here conjoined to Dutch trade rather than French alliance.

The climate in 1625–6 was sensitized to these issues, not least because of Henrietta Maria’s refusal to recognize the authority of the English bishops, and her subsequent non-coronation. Moreover, the Huguenot revolt led by the Duc de Soubise in early 1625 had been met with the attempted French recapture of the Ile de Rhé using English ships, vessels originally supplied as part of the treaty agreement that had guaranteed French support for the relief of the Palatinate. These matters were hugely controversial in England, and in parliament they led to attempts to indict Buckingham for his role in supplying aid to Louis XIII to suppress co-religionists. By 1626, in the shifting allegiances of the early Caroline period, Buckingham was now preparing a fleet to support Soubise and the French had signed a peace treaty with Spain (the Treaty of Monzón, March 1626). These events contributed to a sense of mutual mistrust which, the Venetian ambassador suggested, might create ‘permanent bad feeling between the two nations’ (CSPV, 1625–1626, 144). As one contemporary tract summarized it, ‘It is never safe to trust to French papists’ (Malcolm, 2007, 140).

The cancellation of the coronation entry seems to have had some longer lasting effects. The City’s expenditure of £4,300 for pageantry not actually staged lingered on in the account books, with disputes over how to resolve the debt, and Thomas Middleton, who had also done work towards the royal entry, remained unpaid at his death in 1627 (Bergeron, 1970, 93–4; Middleton, 2007, 1900). Similarly, although Bernard Jansen recovered some £7 9s 2d on the arbitration of the Lord Chief Justice in 1627, unsettled bills remained in the Dutch Church archives until 1628, when the church decided to auction the paintings (Grell, 1996, 180). Jacob Cool paid Jonson £10 and paid off Cleyn’s bill, and in his will he donated the £25 ‘disbursed . . . for the Dutch pageant’ to the repair of the Dutch Church (Grell, 1996, 179; Masque Archive, Royal Entry, 10).

More significantly, the cancellation caused considerable adverse comment, as the Venetian ambassador noted, and in the 1650s some historians, such as Peter Heylyn and Anthony Weldon, argued that the abandoned procession had damaged the royal image and created a ‘mislike of government’ (Bergeron, 1970, 93; Smuts, 1989, 90). The cancellation of the procession, combined with the controversy over the coronation oath, may have fostered the impression that Charles was insufficiently concerned about his popularity. Certainly the issue of how far the coronation oath bound the King to obey pre-existing laws or how far it was an oath only to God rankled enough in some circles for it to be revived at Laud’s trial in 1644 (Sommerville, 1986, 64–6; Strong, 2005, 238–40). The reports that (according to the Venetian ambassador) ‘people talk of the possibility of his Majesty not being crowned, so as to remain more absolute, avoiding the obligation to swear to the laws’ (CSPV, 1625–1626, 51) suggest the degree of concern that the coronation and its surrounding ceremonial had provoked. Although sections of the public will have reacted in differing ways to the political debates and the loss of a good day’s entertainment, Charles I is reported to have said in May 1626 that he feared he had already ‘lost the love of [his] subjects’ (Joseph Mead, cited in Middleton, 2007, 1900). As Malcolm Smuts (1989), 91 has suggested, when crisis did occur in the 1640s, the king perhaps faced it with a weakened charisma caused by the failure to uphold the tricky monarchical balance of majesty and popularity.

James Knowles