ABSTRACT
On 26 December 1 6 1 3 Frances Howard married Robert Carr, now Earl of Somerset, in what was the major court event of the Christmas season. Chamberlain in a letter to Alice Carleton provides a description of the occaswn:
The mariage was upon Sonday without any such braverie as was looked for, only some of his followers bestowed cost on themselves, the rest exceeded not either in number or expence. She was married in her haire and led to chappell by her bridemen a Duke of Saxonie (that is here) and the earle of Northampton her great uncle. The dean of Westminster preached and bestowed a greate deale of commendation on the younge couple, on the Countesse ofSalisburie, and the mother vine (as he termed her) the Countess of Suffolke. The Dean of the chappell coupled them, which fell out somwhat straungely that the same man, shold marrie the same person, in the same place, upon the self-same day (after sixe or seven yeares I know not whether) the former partie yet living: all the difference was that the Kinge gave her the last time, and now her father. The King and Quene were both present and tasted wafers and ypocras as at ordinarie weddings. 1
Chamberlain is disappointed at the lack of expenditure on wedding outfits (though not, interestingly, much troubled by the bride's appearing 'in her haire' as a sign of virginity) . But if there was not much expense on the clothes of the bridal party, conspicuous consumption was to follow. The couple received gifts from courtiers great and small. Chamberlain estimated their value as £12,000, while Thomas Penruddock told the Earl of Arundel that the offerings 'from all persons of quality' were 'esteemed to be no less worth than £30,000 in plate andjewels' .2 Everyone judged it in their best interests, whatever scruples they might have had, to perform the obligation of honouring the marriage of the King's favourite, from whom benefits
could be expected in future to flow. There was considerable expenditure, too, upon the entertainments for the marriage. On the wedding night Campion's Somerset Masque3 was performed, to be followed the next evening by A Challenge at Tilt delivered by two Cupids, scripted by Jonson. Two days later Jonson's The Irish Masque occupied the evening, and then on 1 January 1 6 1 4 the challenge of the Cupids was taken up in a tilting. The King requested a repeat of The Irish Masque on 3 January, and the following night the Lord Mayor, Thomas Middleton, was coerced by the King into entertaining the couple. (He had at first protested that his house was not big enough, only to be told to command the biggest hall in town and get on with it.) At least one play, and a Masque c!f Cupid by the mayor's namesake were performed. (Middleton's masque, most regrettably, is lost.) The festivities were rounded off on Twelfth Night by Gray's Inn's offering of The Masque if Flowers,4 funded at a cost of £2,000 by Francis Bacon. Poets also offered gifts of verse. Jonson wrote a poem 'To the Most Noble, and Above His Titles, Robert, Earl of Somerset ' ; 5 William Alabaster composed an Epithalamium in Latin.6 Terracae's poem on the nullity was probably completed before the marriage, but later in 1 6 14 Chapman published his defence of the annulment and remarriage, in his long poem, Andromeda Liberata. 7
The orgy of expense and gift-giving at this marriage has usually been taken to demonstrate the corruption and hypocrisy of the Jacobean court, and to exemplifY the subordination of principle to self-interest that the whole system of patronage required. Though recent scholarship has done much to make the nature of a patronage culture more fully understood, 8 the prevailing judgement is that the line between acceptable conformity to the system and degrading corruption was frequently transgressed in the Jacobean court, and never more than on this occasion. The literary compositions generated by the wedding have come in for especial censure from critics. In this chapter I want to consider the texts themselves for what they can tell us of attitudes to the marriage at the time of its solemnisation, but first it is necessary to examine the sources and conse quences of this hostile critical reaction. The adverse commentary on the poems seems to derive from a number of different impulses which need to be distinguished one from the other.
