ABSTRACT
This chapter places queens consort at the heart of two tensions in early modern English culture: competing strands of curiosity and condemnation which characterised English experiences of foreign culture; and competing impulses towards tolerance and intolerance in post-Reformation society. Cultural exchange was vital to British culture. Global trade, conspicuous consumption, a nascent empire, the Grand Tour and a Restoration court inflected with pronounced Francophile tendencies all contributed to extensive exchange with other cultures across the social spectrum.1 In art, learning, political theory, food and clothing, contact with Europe and the ‘New World’ had a transformative impact, with foreign elements transformed by absorption into English culture.2 But such encounters were not without tensions. Travel existed on the cusp of cosmopolitanism and xenophobia, between the desire to experience the foreign and anxiety about the threat which that experience posed to identity.3 Acknowledging these contradictions is important. Cultural transfer/transmission scholarship often contains implicit 21st-century biases, positioning diversity as an overwhelmingly positive cultural stimulus in ways which may not have gelled with contemporary experiences. Such approaches treat culture like an ecosystem, with speed of growth and evolution directly related to the gene-pool’s diversity.4 Yet recent work by Edward Chaney and Tony Claydon has demonstrated that although 17th-and 18th-century English culture was injected with elements of a powerful foreign aesthetic, pan-European engagement proved problematic for national identity.5 Oscillation between curiosity and condemnation was ever-present and destabilising. Rome, for example, was both ‘the Eternal City’ and ‘the Whore of Babylon’: whilst Christopher Wren looked to Rome for inspiration to rebuild London following the Great Fire of 1666, others placed the blame for that fire squarely upon Roman Catholics.
