ABSTRACT
Charles’s court was not, of course, a new institution. All kings have courts, though in many ways they are extensions of the ruler’s own family: the place where he can feel at home, manipulating the courtiers’ activities and environment to reflect his fantasies, aspirations, anxieties and policies. A court can be a public place, in which most of the action occurs with the curtains open: spectacle and show teach the audience their monarch’s virtues; poets celebrate them; playwrights praise them; painters adorn them; and sculptors preserve them in perpetuity. In such a court great matters of state may be debated at the banqueting table; political factions founded on real issues may clash during the minuet, with the choice of a partner for the quadrille becoming perhaps the sign for the selection of an ally in a bloody war. Charles had other palaces in both London and the rest of his realm.
