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Chapter 2

The Ambassador’s Point of View, from London to Paris (1608–9)

In 1611, the French ambassador in Venice, Léon Brulart, wrote to a colleague: “Let ceremonial rules and compliments be exactly observed, and our charges devoted and obliged to maintain them, for he who sins in one single point ruins everything.”¹ For want of an appropriate salutation to a foreign dignitary, a treaty negotiation could fall apart. Consequently, the ceremonies surrounding even the most routine diplomatic encounters required an intense attention to detail. Outside observers might dismiss diplomatic fights over purely ceremonial favors as so much preening. How petty, we might think, to let a mistake in etiquette or a slight to an individual’s dignity disrupt meaningful political proceedings. From the diplomat’s point of view, though, there was nothing inconsequential about a breach of protocol. If a delegate paid a visit to the other resident ambassadors at his new posting in the wrong order, or if a host seated his diplomat guest in the wrong place at the dinner table, that small faux pas destabilized the symbolic order that governed relations among European states.

The chief principle underlying European diplomatic protocol in the early modern period was known as the rule of precedence (préséance). Established by Pope Julius II in 1504, the rule of precedence ranked European kingdoms and principalities into a hierarchy that determined the degree of favor to be shown toward each country’s delegates. Ambassadors, in their roles as representatives of their sovereigns, had to keep up the appearance of formality and dignity that signified their kingdom’s place in the European order. This was particularly true in Rome, where the rules of precedence were most strictly observed. As the French ambassador in Venice wrote to his colleague d’Estrées in Rome in October 1640, “Rome is a veritable theater on which the dignity of his Majesty’s name must be highly maintained, and as such it is important to alter nothing.”²

Full-throated defenses of the monarch’s dignity and commands to “alter nothing” in ceremonial practice reflected not that precedence was a fixed and rigid ranking but conversely that the accepted hierarchy of states was under constant revision in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Julius II’s official rankings were not updated to include the new political entities that emerged over the period, so statesmen from those countries had to negotiate for their place in the diplomatic order. The question of precedence proved particularly difficult to resolve when the United Provinces broke away from the Spanish-controlled Netherlands and officially became a republic in 1581, as general rules about the relative rank of duchies and elected and hereditary monarchies did not apply to this new type of polity.³ These kinds of challenges to the established order, combined with the fact that some Protestant countries discounted the authority of the pope in underwriting the legitimacy of precedence rules, rendered Julius’s ranking increasingly irrelevant. No longer codified or inscribed in any legal framework, precedence became contingent, a matter of continual negotiation. The result of this situation “was bitter, often unedifying, sometimes comic battles over precedence.”⁴ Different European courts observed different rankings, depending on the state of their relations with particular countries. At the start of a treaty negotiation, representatives would deliberate to establish rules of precedence for the duration of the conference. Europe’s most powerful monarchies, especially France and Spain, competed for precedence on these multiple diplomatic stages.⁵ In this way, the fluidity of the hierarchy allowed individual ambassadors the possibility of distinguishing themselves professionally by achieving a higher rank for their states. To adapt the metaphor used by diplomats themselves, ambassadors functioned not only as actors in the “theater” of diplomacy, enacting the prestige and dignity of the political entities they represented. They were also, to some extent, its authors, helping to determine the “script” of precedence that regulated diplomatic relations.

Given the highly theatrical quality of diplomatic life in early modern European courts, the spectacles performed on courtly stages for audiences including visiting and resident ambassadors might appear superfluous. Yet entertainments remained important social events for the diplomatic community, where any favor or honor bestowed upon an individual ambassador was sure to be witnessed by the assembled public. Centered on a theatrical spectacle, diplomats’ behavior in the viewing stands constituted a second level of dramatic performance in meta-theatrical relation to the event onstage.

Performing in the Theater of Diplomacy

When an ambassador took his seat for a court entertainment, he was every bit as much a part of the spectacle as were the dancers on the stage. As spectator accounts suggest, the host court took care to choreograph the arrangement of the audience to signal the relative importance of its attendees. Each spot in the spectators’ gallery carried significance. Viewers could interpret the composition of the audience space as a spectacle in its own right. Spectators were also conscious of their own position as objects of fellow audience members’ gaze, a fact that transformed their experience of watching the entertainment into a kind of performance as well.

Courtly spaces of all kinds were of course highly theatrical. Works on courtiership, such as Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, urged aristocrats to present themselves in society in such a way as to appeal to the eyes of fellow nobles. Courtiers experienced their mode of being in society as a form of acting, as inhabiting a role.⁶ For those who also worked as diplomats, self-presentation took on an additional layer of complexity. As Timothy Hampton has observed: “The courtier dissimulates in order to represent himself effectively at court. The ambassador, by contrast, represents himself while representing another.”⁷ The doubled representation carried out by ambassadors “elicited new types of self-presentation and a necessary rethinking of traditional modes of acting.”⁸

The theatrical dimension of diplomatic work remained a constant theme of literature on diplomacy throughout the early modern period. In fact, the conception of the diplomatic arts as a form of public theatrical performance marks even the earliest treatises and manuals for ambassadors, such as Bernard du Rosier’s Short Treatise About Ambassadors (Ambaxiator brevilogus, 1436).⁹ The demands on an ambassador’s performance skills grew increasingly exigent—and more complex—with the emergence of “permanent diplomacy,” or the practice of maintaining resident ambassadors in foreign courts.¹⁰ As Europe’s society of diplomats expanded to fill these new permanent roles, the number of ambassador’s manuals also burgeoned. Often echoing the courtier handbooks that proliferated in the same time period, these works advised the ambassador on his self-presentation at the host court. The portrait of the perfect ambassador that emerged from this corpus of texts emphasized external qualities: physical beauty, eloquence, the ability to dance, sing, and ride.¹¹ He should have a personal fortune sufficient to furnish his embassy in accordance with the prestige of his sovereign (and to keep him free from the temptation of bribes).¹² The manuals also argue for the importance of less tangible virtues such as prudence, knowledge, and noble blood, though even these interior traits are justified by their contribution to the successful outer performance of diplomacy. Juan Antonio de Vera’s treatise on the “perfect ambassador,” for example, explains how good verbal skills can make up for a lack of knowledge, allowing the ambassador to “divert [the conversation] as dexterously as possible away from subjects that he does not know well.”¹³ Even the requirement that an ambassador be of noble rank was explained by a pragmatic concern for his ability to perform his role as representative of his sovereign in a convincing manner, as when Alberico Gentili concludes that “it is scarcely probable that a man of ignoble station could assume the personality of one of noble rank, much less that of a prince.”¹⁴

This more elaborate external enactment of pleasing behaviors served not only to project a positive image of the ambassador’s sovereign but also to conceal or deflect attention away from the resident ambassador’s primary activities: gathering and disseminating information. The most contentious virtue ascribed to the ambassador was that of prudence, described by most authors as the talent to hide anything that might be detrimental to his country’s image and political objectives. In other words, the diplomat had to excel at dissimulation.¹⁵ The nature of the ambassador’s work was understood as inherently duplicitous. In De officio legati (c. 1490), the first text to expound upon the duties of a resident ambassador, humanist author and translator Ermolao Barbaro described the diplomat as the perfect embodiment of moderation and discretion.¹⁶ Fully assuming the role of his state’s representative, he was simply “to do, say, advise, and think whatever may best serve the preservation and aggrandizement of his own state,” while secretly gathering intelligence for his monarch.¹⁷

This early conception of the resident ambassador’s work recalls Henry Wotton’s often quoted line: “The ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.”¹⁸ In this view, a sovereign and his ambassador and delegates acted in concert to work toward a shared goal. As such, they behaved as what Erving Goffman has labeled a “performance team,” or a group of individuals who coordinate their roles to project an agreed-upon image to an unsuspecting public.¹⁹ By contrast, in the decades following Barbaro’s work, other writers characterized the ambassador as a free, independent performer not bound to such close cooperation with his master or the other members of his delegation. Niccolò Machiavelli’s letter of “Advice to Raffaello Girolami” (1522), for example, suggested that the ambassador might work for his own private interests as well as for his monarch’s. To this end, it was doubly important that he “acquire great consideration” in his host court, which he could do “by acting on every occasion like a good and just man; to have the reputation of being generous and sincere, and to avoid that of being mean and dissembling, and not to be regarded as a man who believes one thing and says another.”²⁰ This quintessentially Machiavellian piece of advice highlights the paradoxical nature of diplomatic performance in which the ambassador dissimulates in order to maintain his reputation as an honest person. In a book of maxims titled Ricordi (1530), Florentine jurist and diplomat Francesco Guicciardini echoed this idea. He wrote that, although “frank sincerity is a quality much extolled,” deception is sometimes necessary and thanks to a good ambassador’s “reputation for plain dealing,” “his artifice will blind men more.”²¹ In the diplomatic scenario, Guicciardini reminds us, it is not only the ambassador who can deceive. Some sovereigns conceal their true political intentions from the agents they dispatch to enact them, “judg[ing] it better only to impart what they would have the foreign prince persuaded of, thinking they can hardly deceive him unless they first deceive the ambassador who is the instrument and agent for treating with him.”²² The extreme theatricality of diplomatic practice as described in these texts conjures a scenario in which all men—even those supposed to be on the same political “team”—are in reality acting for their own self-interest, professional prestige, and even financial gain in the form of gifts. In this context, the comparison of ambassadors to actors no longer simply described the diplomat’s protean adaptability and charisma but highlighted his capacity for dissembling, his essential untrustworthiness.

This aura of suspicion led diplomatic thinkers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to reject the theatrical metaphor in favor of more limited conceptions of the ambassador’s freedom to perform. Torquato Tasso imagined the possibility that the ambassador might manipulate but only in the interests of his sovereign.²³ In his De legationibus libri tres (1585), Alberico Gentili put much stricter limits on the ambassador’s agency, casting him as an actor who carried out his sovereign’s script: “Why should the ambassador have the right to attempt anything apart from his instructions? … The ambassador is an interpreter…. [I]n a case where definite instructions have been given, ambassadors should not be allowed to diverge even a finger’s breadth from them.”²⁴ Indeed, he went so far as to suggest that ambassadors should “assume” the personality of the princes they represented when delivering orations.²⁵ As Ellen McClure observes, Gentili leaves behind a language of theater, opting instead for a vocabulary of the sacred to strengthen the connection between the monarch and his legate.²⁶ The ambassador is like an angel, Gentili writes, carrying messages “in the interest of the state or sacred person by whom he has been sent.” For Gentili, fidelity—not prudence or discretion—is the most prized quality in an ambassador.²⁷

The anti-theatrical bias of diplomatic manuals was expressed in more strident terms in the early part of the seventeenth century. In his L’ambassadeur (1603), Jean Hotman declared, “An embassy and theater are dissimilar things.”²⁸ Although he described the ambassador’s work as entailing the “representation” of his monarch and the manipulation of speech to persuade his foreign interlocutors, Hotman insisted that the theatrical metaphor was insufficient to depict diplomacy because the ambassador could never change roles.²⁹ Juan de Vera figured the diplomat’s relationship to his prince through a biological metaphor: “The Ambassador is called by some the organ by which the thoughts and ideas of absent people are communicated, and the embassy the art of keeping two princes in friendship.”³⁰ The ambassador in this view is not an actor giving voice and movement to the sovereign’s script. He is a prosthetic extension of the monarch’s body: his eyes and ears abroad.

Hotman’s and Vera’s outright rejection of the theatrical metaphor demonstrates the persistent force of that trope: they found it necessary to address the analogy of ambassadorship to acting even as they discounted the utility of the comparison. By the end of the seventeenth century, texts on diplomacy recuperated theatrical terms, as Abraham de Wicquefort declared in his summa work L’ambassadeur et ses fonctions: “There is no personage more actor-like than the ambassador.”³¹ Despite theorists’ qualms, moreover, individual ambassadors continued to rely heavily on a theatrical vocabulary in their own correspondence throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Again and again, they attested to their efforts to represent, to demonstrate, to make visible an intention, emotion, or quality of their sovereign. They described their role as that of actors playing out by proxy, in a virtual way, interaction among their princes. It is clear that a profound sense of theatricality characterized diplomats’ daily life, self-understanding, and worldview. Whether motivated by personal honor, professional duty, or material self-interest, ambassadors were keenly attuned to the performative dimension of their work and put significant effort into making sure that they played their parts well.

Court Entertainment as Diplomatic Meta-theater: The “Incident” of the Masque of Beauty

Diplomats’ keen awareness of their self-presentation manifested itself particularly acutely in their participation in lavish celebrations including spectacular court entertainments. On one hand, an ambassador’s presence as a spectator at a ballet, masque, or other festive occasion signaled his prestige and that of his sovereign in the eyes of his hosts. Prime occasions to see and be seen, entertainments provided a key stage on which ambassadors enacted their own professional skill and their prince’s “dignity.” In dispatches recounting these events, moreover, ambassadors shrewdly narrated their own performance as spectators in order to burnish their own image and reputation. Sometimes this entailed giving a detailed description or penetrating analysis of the performance onstage, a demonstration of the diplomat’s talent for observation. More often, ambassadors limited their accounts to their own efforts to represent their sovereigns in the best possible way. Examples of both strategies show how the “act” of courtly spectatorship was a dynamic theatrical practice rather than a passive state.

A rich example of the stakes of diplomatic spectatorship comes from the correspondence of Antoine Le Fèvre de la Boderie (1555–1615), who headed an extraordinary embassy to London from April 1606 until December 1609. Already a seasoned diplomat when he was first sent to England in April 1606, he had begun his political career as a secretary to the French ambassador in Rome in 1592 and then became an ambassador in his own right serving in Brussels after the Treaty of Vervins (1598), then in Turin in 1605. His stint in England occurred in a relatively peaceful decade, the period of “armed neutrality” leading up to the Thirty Years’ War.³² Accordingly, the embassy had only limited political goals. Henri IV’s instructions charged the ambassador with three primary tasks: making headway on a trade agreement, confirming an alliance against Mediterranean piracy, and keeping an eye on religious conflicts. The ambassador reported on all these matters in his missives back to France, addressed to state secretaries Nicolas de Neufville, marquis de Villeroy, or Pierre Brulart de Sillery, vicomte de Puisieux. He also devoted significant space to recording and commenting on the spectacle of statecraft in England. In these passages of his dispatches, Le Fèvre de la Boderie works to distinguish himself as an astute observer of political theater. After witnessing James I’s appearance at Parliament, for example, he concluded a detailed description of his clothes, the throne, and the setting by remarking: “The ceremony was in truth very beautiful and felt of its ancientness.”³³ He signaled the close alliance between England and Denmark by detailing the feasts, fireworks, and other entertainments lavished on the Danish king during his visit to London in summer 1606, noting that the preparations served as “a testament to their good neighborliness and friendship.”³⁴

Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s descriptions of events at court are nearly always accompanied by such conjectures about their hidden significance. As Hampton points out, many early modern diplomats styled their dispatches on the model of the relazione penned by Venetian ambassadors for the doge and senate. A relazione writer would highlight his skills “as a reader of signs, as an interpreter,” often by foregrounding his own expert gaze through extensive first-person narration.³⁵ Venetian diplomats—or, more precisely, their professional secretaries who polished the ambassadors’ notes—practiced the form of the relazione as a finely honed craft.³⁶ French ambassadors, by contrast, exhibited widely varying styles in their reports. For example, the volume of hand-copied letters from France’s ambassadors in Venice in the 1630s features an abrupt change in tone when du Houssay took over for the ailing De La Thuillerie in 1638, as the cool professionalism of the older diplomat gives way to panicked queries about protocol, flurries of postscripts, and complaints about the weather.³⁷ Le Fèvre de la Boderie more closely sticks to the Venetian example. Compared to his colleagues from La Serenissima, though, he downplays the first person. The ambassador’s own point of view appears more frequently as an object of someone else’s action (“they tell me”) than as the subject of an independent action or observation.

The ambassador’s personal subjectivity becomes more prominent, however, in the passages devoted to court entertainments. In a December 20, 1607, letter outlining the preparations for a holiday dance, for example, he asserted his interpretation of particular casting choices in the first person: “I also take as a sign of their attempts to display less ill will toward the Catholics that the King, as he left for the hunt, asked the queen to prepare a ball for the Christmas festivities, and took personal responsibility for the expenses which, it is said, must be more than six or seven thousand écus (for they don’t know how to do anything for less here). They remark that almost all the ladies the queen has called to be in the ball are Catholics.”³⁸ The ambassador foregrounds his subjectivity, performing his interpretation in the first person before authorizing his viewpoint with corroborating hearsay. He continues: “What assures me more is that this interpretation is given and publicized by the servants of their Majesties.”³⁹ Mixing direct observation, analysis, and opinion gathered on the ground, the passage exemplifies the “dialectic of testimony and judgment” that, according to Andrea Frisch, characterized eyewitnessing at the turn of the sixteenth to seventeenth century.⁴⁰ At a time when personal testimony was not automatically regarded as authoritative, first-person accounts gained credence through a rhetoric of “intersubjectivity” including cross-reference.⁴¹ Le Fèvre de la Boderie cites English informants to bolster and give context to his own judgments. At the same time, he establishes his bona fides as a credible witness, faithful interpreter, and good spy for the French king. The ambassador’s self-representation in the course of conveying intelligence constituted a kind of performance in writing through which he embellished his own image for the benefit of his masters back in France.

Dispatches recounting the ambassador’s participation as an invited guest at court entertainment heightened the stakes of self-portrayal. His presence and positioning in the dancing hall were an index of his monarch’s “dignity” in the eyes of the host, a sign of estimation displayed for all the other courtiers and diplomats to see. After the entertainment was over, the ambassador’s account of the entertainment represented a second opportunity for performance as he portrayed himself in retrospective narrative as the perfect embodiment of his master’s prestige. The ambassador’s performance-as-spectator had ramifications both for the international status of his state and for his own professional esteem.

The significance of the diplomat’s role as spectator of court performances comes into relief in the texts documenting the diplomatic uproar caused by the failure of the English court to invite Le Fèvre de la Boderie to a masque—Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Beauty—organized by Queen Anna in the Carnival season of 1608. As recounted by Le Fèvre de la Boderie in his correspondence, the incident began in early January 1608 when an ally at the English court, the Duke of Lennox,⁴² warned him that the queen had invited the Spanish ambassador but not him to attend a performance of her new masque.⁴³ This information was shocking because, at least since 1603, it had been customary at the English court to “feast” all the resident and extraordinary ambassadors during the Christmas and Carnival season, including inviting them to select performances of masques or revels.⁴⁴ The news infuriated the French because through her choice of guests Queen Anna displayed a preference for Spain. The London masque hall had become another stage on which the fight for international precedence between the two countries could be played out.⁴⁵

The consequences of the invitation affair unfolded over a yearlong period and took a toll on the morale and energy of its participants. Venetian ambassador Marc’ Antonio Correr reported in a February 20, 1609, dispatch that Queen Anna “says she is resolved to trouble herself no more with Masques.”⁴⁶ Le Fèvre de la Boderie, for his part, was recalled to France soon after his attendance at the Masque of Queens.⁴⁷ Viewed in the light of its prolonged effects, Anna’s action in excluding the French ambassador from The Masque of Beauty could be characterized as a “diplomatic incident.” Historian Lucien Bély usefully defines the diplomatic incident as an event that breaches the usually impenetrable barrier between diplomacy’s external ceremony and the secret play of diplomatic relationships and strategies,⁴⁸ revealing the “underground tensions” that invisibly structure the day-to-day culture of diplomacy.⁴⁹ This is certainly true of the incident surrounding Le Fèvre de la Boderie and the queen’s masques. In disrupting the normal diplomatic protocol and etiquette around entertainments at the English court (in which ambassadors were traditionally included on a routine basis), the event produced a spate of texts in which ambassadors, secretaries, and monarchs were forced to articulate the significance of court entertainment in relation to issues of prestige, visibility, and political reciprocity. The correspondence exposes a virtual space of preparation and planning that Goffman designates the “back region or backstage” of social performance: the space in which “illusions and impressions are openly constructed” and thus “the impression fostered by the performance is knowingly contradicted as a matter of course.”⁵⁰ In this way, the incident and its aftermath disclosed the masque’s role in maintaining, representing, and publicizing international relationships.

Diplomatic correspondence relating to the invitation incident provides one source of insight into the importance of the masque as an arena for performing political relations. In his letters to Villeroy and Puisieux, Le Fèvre de la Boderie becomes both lead actor in and author of the drama he describes. He uses the first person liberally, focalizing events through his own limited perspective. Yet he also incorporates multiple perspectives through a dramatic narrativization of his encounters with various players in the incident. For example, the ambassador portrays himself first learning about the invitations from his friend and informant the Duke of Lennox, who relays the information by recounting a conversation between Anna and James: “The King remained somewhat astonished and responded to her only: but what will the French ambassador say about the Spanish ambassador being there while the French one is not?”⁵¹ Through the mouthpiece of Lennox, Le Fèvre de la Boderie attributed the diplomatic scandal to a domestic dispute between the king and queen. The irrational, hispanophilic queen caused the problem; the king supported the French. In the ambassador’s telling, this version gained credence a few days later, when the king proposed a private dinner and entertainment for the French ambassador as recompense for his exclusion from the masque. In correspondence to his masters back in France, Le Fèvre de la Boderie supposed that James’s failure to stand up to his wife illustrated Anna’s power over him and thus displayed his weakness as both a husband and a king.⁵²

The French ambassador’s portrayal of the incident as a domestic matter appears strategic. It certainly stands in contrast to the interpretation provided by his diplomatic peers. Venetian ambassador Zorzi Giustinian, for example, emphasized the political motivations for French and English actions. He described the French ambassador’s offense as related to “this undecided question of precedence.”⁵³ Meanwhile, his dispatches from that January suggest covert political agendas that might explain the dis-invitation. As he noted in a relation to the Venetian senate, the English were trying to engineer an alliance with Spain, sealed through a marriage of Prince Charles to the Infanta.⁵⁴ As was characteristic for Venetian ambassadors, Giustinian depicts himself through these interpretations as a skilled analyst of the political scene, providing rich context and a broad angle from which his vicarious audience in the senate could view and interpret events. In contrast, Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s mapping of the political onto the domestic may be read as a (conscious or unconscious) interpretive strategy to negate the suspicion that any deeper political cause—or any fault of his own—lay at the root of his non-invitation. He cast himself as wronged victim of Anna’s caprice and James’s weakness.

The ambassador’s emphasis on the conjugal nature of the dispute also calls attention to the importance of both public and private stages for diplomatic representation. Ambassadors’ deductions about the emotional and affective life of the sovereign had an important place in diplomatic practice. As Lucien Bély notes, “In political systems where power was incarnated by men and women chosen by God—hereditary monarchy—it was above all necessary to be informed as to their personality, health, and will.”⁵⁵ Part of diplomats’ task as “honorable spies” was to hunt for clues about the sovereign’s state of mind and relationships. No clear boundary divided personal from political relationships.

Yet ambassadors’ writings show that an important distinction remained between public and private representation of those relationships. Diplomats’ understanding of this distinction is illustrated by Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s reaction to James’s proposal to hold a private dinner for the French ambassador as a way to compensate him for missing the ballet. Le Fèvre de la Boderie protested: “There was no proportion between a dinner the King would give me and the honor the ambassador would receive by intervention in the ballet; for one is a private action, and the other a spectacle and public solemnity…. All the spectators would be the judges of this action and would publish it throughout the whole of Christendom.”⁵⁶

The key difference between a “private action” (une action privée) and a “public solemnity” (une solemnité publique) pertains to the question of who is watching. James offered the private dinner to reassure the French ambassador of his personal commitment to their relationship and to the relationship between their kingdoms. Historian William Roosen borrows the sociopsychological term “stroking” to characterize these gestures of intimacy and political “friendship” of a monarch toward a particular ambassador.⁵⁷ The underlying assumption was that the king’s personal touch represented the highest kind of favor an ambassador could desire. But that reasoning was incomplete, as Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s rejection of the invitation reveals. A demonstration of the king’s favor only mattered insofar as it took place before an audience. Indeed, as Le Fèvre de la Boderie describes it, the public sign of friendship conferred by an invitation to the masque had two audiences: the public of other dignitaries at the London court who would “judge” it and the larger audience of “the whole of Christendom” who would hear about it through dispatches and correspondence. The ambassador’s focus on the spectators of his relations with the king makes it unclear, when he uses the word “spectacle,” whether he refers to the masque itself or to the display occasioned by his presence in the audience.

Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s masters back in France shared his view that the public display of his relationship with the English king was paramount. In fact, they took an even more radical approach to analyzing the theatrical dimension of diplomatic relations with the English court, interpreting the non-invitation itself as a kind of theater. Secretary Villeroy echoed the king in warning Le Fèvre de la Boderie that the affair may not have been as straightforward as he seemed to believe. The whole scandal, he suggested, may have been a “ruse”; he advised that “they sought an argument with us.”⁵⁸ Henri IV himself chimed into the discussion, advising his ambassador that while he approved of his efforts to defend the public dignity of the French state, it was also important to moderate his displays of displeasure. He wrote that it was necessary to “demonstrate” the correct amount of offense in response: “I esteem that you should show that I shall have just occasion to be offended, but without stirring this up any more than that, or making any more of a fuss, which is perhaps what they want.”⁵⁹ Neither Henri IV nor Villeroy explained any political motives for a potential quarrel between France and England, adopting a strategy of concealment such as Francesco Guicciarini described in the Ricordi. Effectively, they were asking Le Fèvre de la Boderie to perform a role without knowledge of the script. Lacking access to such “backstage” insights, the ambassador improvised within the sphere of political representation provided by the public occasion of the masques to maintain at least the appearance of good relations between the French and English crowns.

The awkward rhetorical and performative contortions required to keep up appearances become clear in Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s accounts of the (temporary) resolution to the non-invitation incident. Rather than host the French ambassador at a private dinner, James instead invited him to a different semipublic event: a masque organized by the king himself in celebration of the marriage of his favorite courtier, John Ramsay, Viscount Haddington (a Scot), to Elizabeth Radcliffe (an Englishwoman). The Haddington Masque was performed on February 9, 1608, with a script by Ben Jonson, designs by Inigo Jones, and music by Alfonso Ferrabosco.⁶⁰ The performance celebrated the marriage and optimistically projected an image of Anglo-Scottish political union through vibrant depictions of love and fertility.⁶¹ The printed “Description of the Masque” vividly evokes the opening set design featuring a “high, steep, red cliff, advancing itself into the clouds,” upon which were “erected two pilasters, charged with the spoils and trophies of Love … and overhead two personages, Triumph and Victory, in flying postures and twice so big as the life.”⁶² The action begins “on the sudden, with a solemn music, a bright sky breaking forth, … two doves, then two swans with silver gears, drawing forth a triumphant chariot in which Venus sat,” while Graces toss garlands into the audience.⁶³ The reader of the pamphlet imagines a pompous spectacle that first draws the eye upward to be dazzled by ingenious machines, then down to the ground to witness mythological figures declaiming high verse and masquers in silver and carnation costumes, feathers and jewels on their heads, dancing with “elegancy and curious device.”⁶⁴

None of this magnificence appears in Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s dispatch recounting the event. He described it simply as “meager.” In his report to Secretary Villeroy after the performance, Le Fèvre de la Boderie declined to comment on the content of the masque or his experience of it: “I tell you nothing of the quality of the ballet, nor of those who danced it, because it seems to me that one is not so anxious to know it.”⁶⁵ Presumed lack of interest on the part of an ambiguous “one”—the king, perhaps?—rhetorically sanctioned his choice to remain silent about the masque itself. He wrote: “I shall assure you merely that they won’t play me again like this last time, and that is what I must principally desire.”⁶⁶ The language of “play” and trickery here operates in a similar way to the ambiguous “spectacle” in his earlier correspondence. The diplomatic theatrics take center stage, supplanting the real entertainment in the ambassador’s discourse.

Renegotiating Intimacy and Publicity Through the Queens’ Entertainments

Le Fèvre de la Boderie was incorrect in thinking that the London court would avoid replaying the same drama in the future. The following year, as the Christmas season approached, the court again scrambled to address thorny problems of precedence in distributing invitations to the masque organized by the queen for the festive season. As Sillery de Puisieux wrote to Le Fèvre de la Boderie: “It appears from the discourses and conversation of the King of Great Britain, his Council and Treasurer, that there is at present no greater or more important affair on the table than this beautiful ballet that puts everyone in such discomfort.”⁶⁷ The new Venetian ambassador, Marc’ Antonio Correr, described how each diplomat struggled to secure an invitation to the masque, and the implicit recognition that went along with it, in a January 9, 1609, dispatch to the doge and senate: “The Spanish and Flemish Ambassadors are now maneuvering to be invited to the Masque. They declare it would be a slight to the Embassy-Extraordinary if it is left out. On the other hand the French Ambassador, who was omitted last year, which produced some sharp words from his Most Christian Majesty, now declares that he will withdraw from Court if he is not invited.”⁶⁸ The French ambassador objected to the requirement to play this game at all. As he reported to Secretary Villeroy in a January 1609 letter, he sent a message to James via Lord Salisbury to the effect that “the favors that ambassadors receive from the princes in whose courts they serve should be purely free, and received rather than requested.”⁶⁹

To move beyond this diplomatic impasse, the French court stepped in with an appropriately theatrical gesture: they staged their own ballet, organized by the queen and hosted by finance minister Maximilien Béthune, duc de Sully, and his wife at their private dance hall in the Arsenal in Paris, and particularly invited the English ambassador George Carew, his wife, and the vice-count of Cranbourne to view it as honored guests.⁷⁰ (Other ambassadors enjoyed a less prestigious, second performance of the ballet in Marguerite de Valois’s palace.)⁷¹ This invitation placed the English court in the French one’s debt, more or less forcing the royals to reciprocate by hosting Le Fèvre de la Boderie at the Masque of Queens a few weeks later.

The diplomatic exchange of entertainments between the French and English courts set in motion another frenzied exchange of correspondence. The discourse generated by this second phase of the “incident” shines a more focused light on issues of intimacy and publicity in relations between diplomats and sovereigns, due to the dynamics of reciprocity, the centrality of women as patrons and hosts, and the participation of the ambassadors’ families as honored guests. Although Le Fèvre de la Boderie previously dismissed the rhetoric of personal or “private” favor, this new wave of correspondence recuperated it and reconciled it to the public, theatrical orientation of the diplomatic struggle for prestige.

The queen’s ballet seems tailor-made to resolve Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s predicament. Very likely, though, the ballet would have taken place even if the French ambassador in London was not being threatened with exclusion from the masque there. Ballets regularly featured in Carnival festivities in Paris. Moreover, the French court, like the English one, habitually signaled favor to ambassadors by inviting them to ballets. Even if the court did not specifically plan the ballet to address the masque incident, however, its performance had a tangible effect on French diplomatic relations with Britain and transformed the language used to discuss and publicize that relationship.

In the days leading up to the ballet’s performance, Le Fèvre de la Boderie and his correspondents continued to discuss the event as an occasion for a highly public, formal, theatrical display of French favor toward the English. On January 23, Secretary Villeroy informed the ambassador about the queen’s preparations for her ballet at the Arsenal:

They have told me that the Queen had Madame de Sully ask Madame the English Ambassador’s wife to see the aforementioned ballet at the Arsenal, where one talks of inviting her husband also, and even the Venetian Ambassador. The King will be there. We hear tell that Queen Marguerite will ask the Nuncio, Don Pedro de Toledo, and the Flemish Ambassador with his wife, where his Majesty may also resolve himself to go, after he has been to the Arsenal. It is not their Majesties who issue this invitation, since there is no dancing at their palace. The English Ambassador, who will be accompanied by Viscount Cranborne, will have the first viewing in the presence of the king, while the others will have to wait to see it at Queen Marguerite’s…. I do not yet know whether the whole mystery will go as planned; but I wanted to forewarn you.⁷²

Villeroy presents himself as a passive observer in the planning of the entertainment. He relays what “they have told me” and what “we hear tell.” He takes pains, though, to show the ambassador that the court is making every effort to single out the English ambassador for special attention. Not only will he see the ballet “in the presence of the king” before the other ambassadors, he will also view it in a more prestigious space, overseen by the real queen and not Marguerite, “another queen of lesser rank,” as Villeroy calls her.⁷³ Finally, the secretary rhetorically distances himself from the arrangements by characterizing them, a bit flippantly, as “the whole mystery”—a choice of terms that simultaneously underscores their enigmatic quality and their theatrical nature (evoking a medieval mystery play).

By the time the French court reported back to Le Fèvre de la Boderie on the performance, the language used to discuss its diplomatic function had changed. In a letter dated February 6, Sillery de Puisieux wrote: “This message is merely … to give you word of the good time and contentment had by the English Ambassador at the ballet of our Queen, which was danced this past Sunday, and which he had been invited to attend by the King, and his wife by the Queen. They had their places and seats right behind their Majesties’ chairs. The King, beyond that, favored their presence with another special grace, which is the wearing of the Order of the Garter, about which the Ambassador felt very honored.”⁷⁴ Whereas Villeroy’s earlier letter stressed the prestige of the invitation to the English in contrast to the less splendid entertainment offered to the other ambassadors, Puisieux here focuses on the ambassador’s personal satisfaction of the event, without regard to others’ experiences. An affective vocabulary prevails: he notes the visitors’ enjoyment of the occasion and the ambassador’s “feeling” of honor in being allowed to wear the very English courtly mark of distinction.⁷⁵ In addition, he illustrates the intimate relation between the French royals and their English guests. He underlines, for example, the proximity of their seats in the dancing hall. He also indicates that the couple received their invitations directly from the king and queen. This contradicts Villeroy’s earlier assertion that the royals would not themselves extend invitations for an event taking place outside the Louvre but strengthens the portrayal of the ballet as a special treat offered personally by the monarchs to the ambassador and his party. Puisieux, in other words, portrays the ballet as an effective means of “stroking” the foreign diplomat, of assuring him of the desire to maintain friendly relations.

Although Puisieux’s emphasis on the power of intimate signs of favor rather than public displays of prestige represented a significant departure from Villeroy and Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s rhetoric, it reflected longstanding practices toward foreign representatives at the French court. As far back as the 1580s, for example, the secretary to Venetian delegate Girolamo Lippomano remarked on the court’s lovingly familiar treatment of the “dear ambassador.”⁷⁶ More recently, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, an unofficial English envoy who had just left Paris in January 1609, described the favors he received from Marguerite de Valois: “I went sometimes also to the court of Queen Margaret … and here I saw many balls or masks, in all which it pleased that Queen publicly to place me next to her chair, not without the wonder of some, and the envy of another, who were wont to have that favor.”⁷⁷ Lord Herbert’s account hints at the way gestures of intimacy could also take on “public” importance when viewed by even a small group of envious onlookers. By reinserting the discourse of intimacy into the unfolding narrative of the affair of the queens’ entertainments, Puisieux opened up the possibility for such a recuperation of “private” displays of royal affection in the more publicity-oriented and theatricalized diplomatic culture of his day.

Puisieux’s emphasis on intimacy and personal favor echoes the content and arrangement of the ballet itself, which featured as its theme romantic love, particularly women’s power over their suitors. Composed by Chevalier⁷⁸ with verses by François de Malherbe and de Lingendes,⁷⁹ the ballet survives in a partial score, a few eyewitness accounts, and an incomplete transcription of the poetry written for the dance published by Toussainct du Bray under the title Recueil des vers du balet de la Reyne. As reconstructed through these various sources, the entertainment featured a set design depicting a mountain in the background. It began with a procession or dance by twelve pages, accompanied by viol music, as a prelude to a majestic recitative song for a singer representing Renommée or Fame. A dance by eight “shades” followed, and then the “mountain” opened to reveal an aquatic backdrop and a theater machine in the shape of a dolphin. Perched on the dolphin’s back, the singer Angélique de Paulet, scantily costumed as a naiad, performed a second récit. Her song paints a portrait of court life dominated by women in their role as tyrannical mistresses of men’s hearts.⁸⁰ Invoking Petrarchan commonplaces, her verses recount the suffering of lovers and recommend that courtiers “adore them without loving them.”⁸¹ At the conclusion of her performance, a final set change revealed a garden scene from which emerged Marie de’ Medici herself and several ladies dressed as nymphs who performed a ballet. The verses penned to accompany this dance continue the Petrarchan theme of the naiad’s song. The dancers “speak” in the collective first person (“nous”) about their disregard for Cupid. By spurning the god of Eros, the dancers maintain erotic power: “For the snow in our breast / Impedes his plans so well.”⁸² The celebration of chastity casts the female courtiers in a position of authority relative to male spectators and provides an enticing prelude to the social dancing that followed the spectacle.⁸³

Gender distinctions also characterized the royal family’s interactions with their diplomatic guests. As Puisieux remarked, the king invited Carew, while the queen hosted his wife. The king bestowed the honor of the Garter on Carew, while the queen directed particular courtesies toward the “ambassadrice.”⁸⁴ In their accounts, Puisieux and Carew describe parallel, “his and hers” gestures of cordiality, symmetrical like the moves of a courtly dance. The women’s participation in the ritual serves as a critical supplement to the relationship between the king and the ambassador. Their presence marks the occasion as social as well as political, an act of personal hospitality in addition to a public ceremony.

By inscribing the ballet in a discourse of hospitality, Puisieux also argued that the intimate favors bestowed on the English ambassador effectively guaranteed better treatment for Le Fèvre de la Boderie in London. He continued: “[The ambassador] made several admiring remarks as much about the nobility [gentillesse] of the ballet as about its magnificence; and he won’t have neglected, I rest assured, to give a very good account of it to his master: which will not worsen your position regarding the one to be danced over there, so Mr. Carew has reassured us a little while ago that you will be well treated there and welcomed to your content.”⁸⁵ Conjecturing about Carew’s account of the ballet in his correspondence with his “master” back in London, Puisieux reminded his reader that the monarch was the ultimate spectator and judge of such events. Although Le Fèvre de la Boderie concerned himself mainly with the live and present audience of fellow ambassadors (and the “whole of Christendom” they synecdochically represented), here Puisieux shifted the attention to the exclusive channels of publicity produced by the ambassador’s writing after the entertainment was over. He implied, moreover, that this way of signifying diplomatic relationships would be more effective in eliciting reciprocal treatment and therefore ensuring French precedence in Britain.

Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s reports on his invitation to the Masque of Queens confirm that the English court reciprocated French gestures of hospitality toward their ambassador. According to the ambassador’s letters, James and Anna mirrored the French king and queen in their displays of intimate affection toward Le Fèvre de la Boderie and his family. They all dined together in the royal family’s private chambers before the entertainment. At the masque, the ambassador was seated next to the king, who assured him “it was in the intention to reserve all the honor for me,” and they talked all the way through the performance.⁸⁶ In the interludes between acts, Queen Anna sought out the ambassador’s wife, “making a thousand gestures of familiarity toward her” (lui faisant mille demonstrations de privauté).⁸⁷ The Duke of York invited the ambassador’s young daughter to dance.⁸⁸ The language of intimacy and familiarity is, if anything, stronger in this letter than in Puisieux’s account of the ballet in Paris.⁸⁹ Themes of private and familial affections between the French and English dominate the narrative. His wife and “little daughter”—rarely mentioned in his correspondence—here play important supporting roles in a scene of hospitality and friendship between the French family and the English royal clan. The ambassador’s choices in narrating the event imply that such personal attentions were the greatest privileges an ambassador could enjoy.⁹⁰

This privileging of private favors would seem to contradict the French ambassador’s claim the previous year that there was “no proportion” between a demonstration of friendship behind closed doors and a vastly preferable invitation to a “public solemnity.” The important distinction at the Masque of Queens was that this display of intimacy took place on a public stage. The ambassador wrote that “the king and the Count of Salisbury have declared and made as public that this festivity was mainly being created only for the love of me.”⁹¹ The diplomatic success of the event hinged on its synthesis of exclusivity and publicity, its status as a private gesture “made as public” for all the world to observe.

Le Fèvre de la Boderie revealed his continued obsession with the wider audience for his treatment at the London court toward the end of his report on the masque. He concluded his account by tallying up the honors paid to him against those shown to the Spanish ambassador the previous year: “There was nothing similar in the favor received by the Spanish ambassador last year, for he was not feasted by the king and did not eat with him but in a room where not even a single councilor accompanied him. Neither the king nor the queen was ever seen to say a word to him while the ballet took place.”⁹² By comparing his experience to that of the Spanish ambassador a year before, Le Fèvre de la Boderie reconstructed these private displays of diplomatic hospitality as another arena for public struggles for precedence.⁹³

In fact, the attentions lavished on the French ambassador at the Masque of Queens set in motion another round of mediation of the event among the diplomatic community. Le Fèvre de la Boderie observed that the masque’s advertisement as an exclusive gift to him allowed the English monarch to smooth over the fact that other ambassadors, including the representative from Venice with whom the crown had a favored relationship, were excluded from the entertainment. Indeed, the Venetian ambassador reported that he had been told: “His Majesty never conceived that this could bring any prejudice to the Republic. The French Ambassador was invited alone as a special mark of regard; his Majesty designed still greater honours for me. No one had a right to claim invitation to another’s house.”⁹⁴ By framing the masque as a personal “invitation to another’s house,” the English court attempted to dodge causing offense to an ally even as their ambassador was excluded from what had previously been considered a public court event. Similar to the way in which Catherine de’ Medici and Charles IX disseminated conflicting accounts of the Bayonne festivity to different European audiences, in the publicization of the Masque of Queens French and English actors manipulated both public and private registers of representation to reassure different sectors of the diplomatic community in London.

Diplomatic correspondence provides a window onto the political “backstage” space of court entertainments. Before, during, and after the theatrical event, political actors maneuvered to spin gestures of hospitality in ways most favorable to their own agendas. Seen through the eyes of diplomats, court masques and ballets appear as highly complex theatrical events possessed of a double layer of theatricality. The performance onstage was surrounded by a second level of performance in which diplomatic spectators made a spectacle of their presence and its implications for the prestige of their monarch. This mise en abyme was encircled by a further level of performance in the discourse that interpreted, publicized, and mediated the political significance of favors bestowed on various ambassadors through the entertainment.

Diplomacy and Authority in the Masque of Queens

With good reason, ambassadors placed the matter of their own maneuvering and posturing around this series of masques and ballets at the center of their correspondence about them. But what of the content of the Masque of Queens itself? As he had for the Haddington Masque, Le Fèvre de la Boderie declined to describe or comment on the spectacle of the Masque of Queens, focusing instead on the personal attentions lavished upon him by the royal family. In this way, the ambassador exemplified a form of diplomatic spectatorship that willfully marginalized the content of lavish court spectacles. The diplomat’s point of view thus offers a fascinating corrective to scholarly accounts of court entertainment that characterize these pompous displays as oppressive tools of monarchal propaganda.

In fact, the Masque of Queens has galvanized a great deal of critical attention around the question of its relationship between patronage and political authority at court. As its title implies, this masque foregrounded Anna’s role as primary sponsor. In the preface to the printed libretto, Ben Jonson underlined Anna’s particular authority as patron and collaborator. Noting that the masque represented “the third time of my being used in these services to Her Majesty’s personal presentations,” Jonson observed that this necessitated a great attention to the “nobility” and “variety” of the spectacle.⁹⁵ He attributed the masque’s main innovation—the “foil or false masque” that preceded the queen’s own entry onto the stage—to Anna herself.⁹⁶ Jonson also highlighted Anna’s role as primary object of the masque’s encomiastic function, in describing the parade of queens that composed the centerpiece: “The twelfth, and worthy sovereign of all I make BEL-ANNA royal Queen of the Ocean, of whose dignity and person the whole scope of the invention doth speak throughout.”⁹⁷ As Leeds Barroll, Clare McManus, and others have explored, the masque thematized feminine authority of all kinds.⁹⁸ The opening antimasque featured a parade of “hags” or witches calling for their leader or “Dame.” Finally, a personification of Heroic Virtue descended to clear away the hell-scape and make way for a pageant of noble queens from antiquity: from Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons, to Bodicea and finally Anna herself, embodying the culmination and epitome of their glory. As described by McManus, the Masque of Queens staged “the empowering specularity of the female body,” a body that was “expressive despite and because of the physical definition of femininity.”⁹⁹

Despite this focus on the nature and limits of feminine authority in the themes, imagery, and text of the spectacle, scholars recall that representations of masculine monarchal power remained a crucial feature of this feminocentric spectacle. The figure who banishes the witches from the stage is described as embodying a “heroic and masculine virtue.”¹⁰⁰ The penultimate dance honors young Prince Charles by having the masquers form the letters of his name.¹⁰¹ In an essay on the Masque of Queens, Stephen Orgel goes further in asserting the primacy of the king’s authority as signaled by his privileged viewing perspective in the audience: “Outside the fiction but at the center of the courtly spectacle, sits the monarch, declaring by his presence that in this masque of queens, heroism may be personified in the royal consort, but the highest virtue is that of the Rex Pacificus, scholar and poet.”¹⁰² Jonson may have organized the spectacle at Anna’s command, but monarchal politics confers final authority to the king. Orgel’s argument here recalls earlier New Historicist arguments that the pompous spectacles of court always refer back to the ultimate monarchal authority that they help realize.¹⁰³ More recent scholarship adopts the nuanced view that spectacles such as the Masque of Queens demonstrate the “polymorphic” nature of the English body politic and played a role in negotiating a fractured, “chaotic and frequently confusing” political structure at the English court.¹⁰⁴

The diplomatic setting adds an extra layer of chaos and confusion to our understanding of the masque’s political context, as it asks us to consider the perspectives of viewers only tangentially interested in power struggles within the English court. Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s account of the masque places himself and the matter of Britain’s diplomatic relations with France at the center of the event. Although it might be tempting to dismiss his perspective as narcissistic or as biased by professional self-fashioning, this is surely not the whole story. His letter exchanges with Villeroy and Puisieux reveal how much time and attention were invested to ensure that the masque accomplished its diplomatic goals. Moreover, since the French ambassador sat alongside the king at the performance, any argument about the significance of James’s privileged vantage point on the dance must apply to Le Fèvre de la Boderie as well.

Given his particular set of preoccupations and expectations, what might he have seen from his seat of honor next to the king, and how might he have interpreted it?¹⁰⁵ The discourses mobilized by the diplomatic correspondence draw attention to features of the masque’s text and imagery that may have spoken to the French ambassador in particular. Much of the scholarship on this masque has focused on the elegant, triumphant second part, the parade of queens. But for a contemporary audience, it was the first, grotesque part of the masque (called the “antimasque” by modern critics)¹⁰⁶ that deserved most attention. The dialogue between the witches and their Dame allows for a scene of exposition in which the hags announce their names and identities. They expound on the vices they represent—Ignorance, Suspicion, Credulity, Falsehood, Murmur, Malice, Impudence, Slander, Execration, Bitterness, and Rage Mischief—all characterized as “faithful opposites / To Fame and Glory.”¹⁰⁷ As Barbara Ravelhofer points out, many Britons—including King James—believed in witches and demons; this scene would have had a “creepy impact” on this sector of the audience in particular.¹⁰⁸ The moral content represented by the witches also takes on special resonance when viewed in the context of the affair over the French ambassador. As Jonson remarks in his marginal notes on the libretto, he gave a great deal of thought to the presentation of the witches in order to make this scene plausible and appealing to spectators. He explains, for example, that he delayed the witches’ proclamation of their identities until the Dame arrived onstage to avoid boring “narrations” directed at the audience rather than another character.¹⁰⁹ Moreover, he had the hags reveal their names in a natural order: “In the chaining of these vices I make as if one link produced another…. Nor will it appear much violenced if their series be considered, when the opposition to all virtue begins out of Ignorance.”¹¹⁰ Jonson aims to produce moral reflection in spectators. The sequence of the witches’ speeches should provoke a consideration of how moral errors accumulate: from ignorance to suspicion to credulity to falsehood to murmur and so forth. It is noteworthy that the “vices” personified in the masque pertain to the circulation of information and discourse. In part, this foreshadows the triumph of “Good Fame” at the end of the masque.¹¹¹

From Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s perspective, however, a more pointed interpretation leaps to mind, in which the hags embody—and mark as “vices”—some of the behaviors and emotional responses produced by the recent diplomatic incident. The sequence of witches onstage echoes the way the French ambassador’s reaction to his non-invitation escalated from “ignorance” and “suspicion” of its political justifications through the spread of “murmur” and “malice” in correspondence, and all the way into “execration,” “bitterness,” and (a mild form of) “rage mischief” in the demands he reportedly transmitted to James. Could the honor of his invitation to the masque have also provided the occasion for a subtle rebuke of his behavior in dance form?

Because Le Fèvre de la Boderie never recorded his impressions of the masque for posterity, what he glimpsed from his ambassador’s oblique gaze and how he interpreted the witches and queens he saw onstage at Whitehall remain unrecoverable. Yet the fact that he neglected the content of the performance in his reports reveals something important about his mode of spectatorship. For the ambassador, attending a masque was less about watching than about acting and interacting. Moreover, the present event paled in significance as compared to the diplomat’s own performance, destined for publication through letters to a wider—and often more prestigious—audience in the masque’s aftermath. The masque provided the centerpiece for these peripheral performances directed at ever-widening circles of audiences, but it was subsumed by the everyday theatrics that surrounded it.

Conclusion

The story of Le Fèvre de la Boderie and the “incident” surrounding his attendance at court masques in London shows that if court entertainments provided a center of gravity for diplomatic relations, they did not function as an exclusive focal point. For ambassadors at the French and English courts, entertainments were a normal part of their annual calendar of duties. They offered an important but routine occasion at which to participate in the life of the host court as a part of its diplomatic community. As such, they allowed individual ambassadors to jockey for little signs of favor that would be noticed by their peers and appreciated by their masters when relayed in correspondence. Court entertainments operated simultaneously as a “public” stage on which diplomats could distinguish themselves before others and as a “private” event in which monarchs bestowed hospitality and gestures of intimate friendliness upon resident foreigners at their court. In this way, entertainments challenged diplomatic spectators to attend both to bilateral personal and political relations with their hosts and to the broader matter of their sovereign’s position on the European stage. In the midst of crafting his own performance for these distinct audiences, the ambassador, understandably, had little attention left over to focus on the entertainment on the masque or ballet stage.

This active form of diplomatic spectatorship revealed in Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s incident complicates the standard narrative of court spectacle as effective propaganda for their sponsors. Those responsible for creating and hosting a ballet or masque had to think of the diplomatic audience as a privileged and highly sensitive sector of the audience and had to try to predict the international consequences of small choices about seating and staging. The norms of diplomatic culture limited the freedom of artists and sponsors to depict and to invite whom they wished. Moreover, however pompous their aesthetic, court spectacles were just one form of representation in a broader theatrical field in which multiple actors continually performed and witnessed others’ performances. The experience of diplomatic spectators might not differ very much from that of other courtiers, who also competed for marks of royal favor before an audience of fellow nobles.¹¹² When court performance is considered not as a uniquely captivating spectacle but as the centerpiece around which other, individual performances took place, we see it not as a blunt instrument of power but rather as a space for negotiation.

All of this portrays the audience for court entertainments as radically fragmented. The fractured audience of early seventeenth-century spectacle represents a significant departure from the courtly entertainments staged by the Valois monarchs (discussed in Chapter 1) that incorporated music, movement, and poetry thought to unite spectators in a shared experience, and whose observer accounts confirm that they succeeded at least partially in configuring their viewers as members of a community. In contrast, the ballets and masques attended by Le Fèvre de la Boderie and his counterparts offered not a common experience but rather a common space in which viewers worked to distinguish themselves. Although diversity reigned over concord in these events, the idea of a united European public haunted the entertainment in the form of the imagined “whole of Christendom” whose gaze Le Fèvre de la Boderie wished to command. However spectral, this ultimate audience for the diplomat’s performance-as-spectator construed diplomacy itself as one big theater. The conception of Europe as a “fictive public” made it theoretically possible for creators and sponsors of court entertainments to attempt to capture that collective vision through forceful performances on international themes.¹¹³ Some of these are the focus of Chapters 3 and 4.