The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. 1

by E. K. Chambers

II
THE ROYAL HOUSEHOLD

[Bibliographical Note.—There is no systematic history of the household, but the growing tendency, notable in such recent works as those of Professor Baldwin and Professor Tout, to dwell on the administrative, as distinct from the 'constitutional', aspect of politics suggests that the gap may some day be filled. A useful short study is R. H. Gretton, The King's Government (1913). Of the numerous books bearing more or less directly on the subject, I give here mainly those which I have found of practical value in writing this chapter. Professor Tout's Chapters in the Administrative History of Mediaeval England, of which the first two volumes have subsequently (1920) appeared, is of course of fundamental importance. The best worked section is that of mediaeval origins. The general surveys of W. Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England in its Origin and Development (1880), and W. R. Anson, The Law and Custom of the Constitution (1886-92), may be supplemented for the earliest period by L. M. Larson, The King's Household in England before the Norman Conquest (1904); for the eleventh to thirteenth centuries by H. W. C. Davis, Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum, i (1913), T. Madox, History and Antiquities of the Exchequer (1769), R. L. Poole, The Exchequer in the Twelfth Century (1912), J. H. Round, The King's Serjeants and Officers of State (1911), and L. W. Vernon Harcourt, His Grace the Steward and the Trial of Peers (1907); for the fourteenth century by T. F. Tout, The Place of the Reign of Edward II in English History (1914), J. C. Davies, The Baronial Opposition to Edward II (1918), F. J. Furnivall and R. E. G. Kirk, Life Records of Chaucer (1875-1900), and J. R. Hulbert, Chaucer's Official Life (1912); for the fifteenth century by C. Plummer, Sir John Fortescue's Governance of England (1885), and by the 'courtesy books' or treatises on domestic service and etiquette in F. J. Furnivall, The Babees Book, &c. (1868, E. E. T. S.), Queen Elizabeth's Achademy, &c. (1869, E. E. T. S.), and R. W. Chambers, A Fifteenth-Century Courtesy Book (1914, E. E. T. S.); for the Privy Council by N. H. Nicolas, Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council (1834-7), J. R. Dasent, Acts of the Privy Council (1890-1907), A. V. Dicey, The Privy Council (1887), J. F. Baldwin, The King's Council in England during the Middle Ages (1913), T. F. T. Plucknett, The Place of the Council in the Fifteenth Century (1918, 4 R. Hist. Soc. Trans. i. 157), E. Percy, The Privy Council under the Tudors (1907), and C. Hornemann, Das Privy Council von England zur Zeit der Königin Elisabeth (1912); and for the Star Chamber, W. P. Baildon's edition of John Hawarde's Reportes del Cases in Camera Stellata (1894), and C. Scofield, The Court of Star Chamber (1900). Some of the above extend to the sixteenth century; but in the main the Tudor-Stuart period has received less attention than it deserves. Even the lists of the great officers, as given in the ordinary books of reference, are generally incorrect. The most valuable summary is the quite recent one of E. P. Cheyney, History of England from the Defeat of the Armada to the Death of Elizabeth, i (1914). Samuel Pegge set out to write an account of the Hospitium Regis and published four sections, on the Esquires of the Body, the Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, the Gentlemen Pensioners, and the Yeomen of the Guard as a first volume of Curialia; or an Historical Account of the Royal Household (1791). From the material left at his death, J. Nichols published two more, on Somerset House and the Serjeants at Arms, in a second volume of Curialia (1806), and some fragments in Curialia Miscellanea (1818). Other special studies are F. S. Thomas, Notes of Materials for the History of Public Departments (1846), and The Ancient Exchequer of England (1848), N. Carlisle, An Inquiry into the Place and Quality of the Gentlemen of his Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Chamber (1829), E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Lords Chamberlain (1907, Malone Soc. Collections, i. 31), W. Nagel, Annalen der Englischen Hofmusik (1894, Beilage zu den Monatsheften für Musikgeschichte, 26), H. C. De Lafontaine, The King's Musick (1909), Lists of the King's Musicians (Musical Antiquary, i-iv, passim). A. P. Newton's valuable paper on The King's Chamber under the Early Tudors (1917, E. H. R. xxxii. 348) appeared after my paragraphs on the Treasurer of the Chamber were written, but has helped me to revise them. An account of the post-Restoration household is given in J. Chamberlayne, Angliae Notitiae, or The Present State of England (1669), which became an annual; and this, with the works of Pegge and Carlisle, were drawn upon for the historical part of W. J. Thoms, The Book of Court (1838). The modern household is the subject of W. A. Lindsay, The Royal Household (1898). A summary, useful for comparison, of the sixteenth-century French household, is in L. Batiffol, The Century of the Renaissance (1916, tr.), 92.

There is, of course, ample material for the historian of the Tudor-Stuart Household when he presents himself. The personal references of annalists, diplomatists, and letter-writers (cf. Bibl. Note to ch. i) help out the more formal documents preserved in large numbers in the Record Office (cf. S. R. Scargill-Bird, Guide to Various Classes of Documents in the Public Record Office³, 1908) and the British Museum (cf. sections on Public Revenue and State Establishments in Classified Catalogue of Manuscripts), of which a few have been printed in A Collection of Ordinances and Regulations for the Government of the Royal Household (Society of Antiquaries, 1790, cited as H. O.), in J. Nichols, Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth² (1823), and Progresses, Processions, and Festivities of James I (1828), and elsewhere. The Record Office, in addition to many records, such as those of the Auditors of Prests (cf. App. B), which relate to the Household, contains the special archives of the Lord Chamberlain's Department and the Lord Steward's Department themselves; both, however, are very fragmentary. The earlier documents of the Lord Chamberlain's Department mainly relate to the Wardrobe. The Warrant books only begin about the reign of Charles I; a selection of entries bearing upon the stage is given by C. C. Stopes in Jahrbuch, xlvi. 92. The papers in the British Museum are partly official records which have strayed from their proper custody, partly the collections of antiquaries, and partly the administrative memoranda of ministers such as Lord Burghley, Lord Salisbury, and Sir Julius Caesar. Similar collections in private hands are calendared in the reports of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, and in particular in the Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquis of Salisbury (1883-1915, cited as Cecil MSS. or Hatfield MSS.). The most important documents for tracing the history of the household consist (a) of account-books, (b) of royal ordinances and of ceremonials either for the household as a whole or for some branch of it, to the more comprehensive of which are sometimes attached schedules of offices with the fees and other allowances belonging to them, and (c) lists of the actual occupants of offices drawn up from time to time for various administrative purposes. The most complete lists seem to be those of officers receiving liveries at coronations and funerals. These are appended to the special Accounts of the Masters of the Wardrobe for such ceremonies, and copies, covering inter alia the coronation (1559) and funeral (1603) of Elizabeth, the coronation (1604) and funeral (1625) of James, the funeral (1612) of Henry, and the funeral (1619) of Anne, are preserved as precedents in Lord Chamberlain's Records, ii. 4-6. On the other hand, it is necessary to exercise caution in using the very numerous lists which bear some such title as 'A Generall Collection of all the Offices in England with their Fees in her Maiesties Gift'. Of these I have noted the following: Stowe MS. 571, f. 6 (1552); Harl. MS. 240 (1545-53); Stowe MS. 571, f. 133 (1575-80); Stowe MS. 571, f. 159 (1587-90); Lansd. MS. 171, f. 246ᵛ (1587-91); Cotton MS., Titus B iii, f. 163ᵛ (1585-93); S. P. D., Eliz. ccxxi (1588-93); Lord Chamberlain's Records, v. 33 (1593); Hargrave MS. 215 (1592-5); Stowe MS. 572, f. 26 (1592-6); Harl. MS. 2078, f. 6 (1592-6); H. O. 241 (misdated 1578) from Peck, i. 51 (1598); Addl. MS. 35848 (1605-7); Addl. MS. 38008 (1605-7); Archaeologia, xv. 72 (1606); Stowe MS. 574 (temp. Jac. I); Stowe MS. 575 (1616). The dates are mostly approximate, rendered possible by the fact that the occupants of a few of the chief posts are usually named. The list of 1552 alone has all the names and is in the full sense an Establishment List. The rest should probably be regarded not as official lists but as convenient handbooks prepared for courtiers seeking patronage. Errors of transcription are frequent, and often recur in several manuscripts. Stowe MS. 574 is interesting, because a second hand has corrected several errors. It seems pretty clear that the names of offices were sometimes retained on these lists after the offices were in fact obsolete. They are not limited to Household Offices, but are usually arranged in four sections, Courts of Justice, Household (1, Household proper, 2, Standing offices; cf. p. 49), Military Posts, Keeperships (cf. p. 11). They include fees payable in the household, as well as at the Exchequer; and have prototypes, in less fixed form, in lists temp. Hen. VIII (Brewer, ii. 873; iii. 364; iv. 868). A more careful list, of somewhat similar type, with names appended, but limited to fees payable at the Exchequer, is to be found in the abstract of revenue and expenditure in 1617 printed with the pamphlet Truth Brought to Light and Discovered by Time (1651, cited as Abstract).

But there are no comprehensive ordinances for the Tudor-Stuart Household, which must largely be studied from its origins. The best text of the Constitutio Domus Regis of Henry I (c. 1135) is in T. Hearne, Liber Niger Scaccarii² (1774), i. 341; a less good one in H. Hall, The Red Book of the Exchequer (1896, Rolls Series), iii. 807. For Edward I we have unprinted ordinances of 1279 (Addl. MS. 4565 H; Lord Steward's Misc. 298), and the description of the palace jurisdictions by a contemporary lawyer (c. 1290) in John Selden's edition of Fleta, seu Commentarius Juris Anglicani (1685); for Edward II ordinances of 1318 and 1323 edited from the French original in Tout, 267, and from a translation by Francis Tate (1601) in Life Records of Chaucer, ii. 1, together with related Exchequer ordinances in Hall, iii. 908, 930. Ordinances of Edward III, not known to be extant, are referred to by the compiler of the Liber Niger Domus Regis Angliae in the reign of Edward IV. Of the Liber Niger a large number of manuscripts exist (Lord Steward's Misc. 299; Exchequer T. of R. Misc. 230; Harl. MSS. 293, f. 19; 298, f. 41; 369, f. 56ᵛ; 610, f. 1; 642, f. 196ᵛ; Soc. Antiq. MS.). It is not certain from which of these the bad text in H. O. 13 is printed; probably it used the last two. The Liber Niger is less an ordinance than an unfinished literary treatise by a household clerk, probably motived by the actual ordinances of 1478, of which an unprinted copy is in Exchequer T. of R. Misc. 206. An ordinance of Henry VII (1493) and a ceremonial of the same reign are in H. O. 107. The documents of Henry VIII's time are complicated. There appear to be three sets of ordinances: (a) the Eltham Articles drawn up by Wolsey (Halle, ii. 56) in Jan. 1526 (Lord Steward's Misc. 299, ff. 158, 163; Exchequer T. of R. Misc. 231; H. O. 137-61, from Harl. MS. 642); (b) ordinances related to a 'new book of household', c. 1540 (H. O. 228-40); (c) scattered ordinances, c. 1532-44 (H. O. 208-27). Subsidiary lists and documents of about the period of (a) are in Lord Steward's Misc. 299, and, perhaps with some of other dates, in Brewer, IV. i. 860. Those printed from a Dunch MS. in Genealogist, xxix, xxx, appear to belong to the 'new book' of (b). A third set, of c. 1544-6, are in H. O. 165-207. Much other material is scattered through the twenty-one volumes of the Calendar of Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII (1862-1910, cited as Brewer), including some of earlier date than the Eltham Articles.—I need hardly add that for the purposes of this chapter I have rarely been able to go beyond printed sources.]

THE ordering of court life and ceremonial was in the hands of a group of departments which made up the somewhat complicated establishment of the royal Household. But the Household, at a time when the personal capacity of the Crown was as yet imperfectly differentiated from its national capacity, was not merely a domestic organization; it was still to a large extent an instrument of central executive government. It must in fact be regarded as the direct descendant of the eleventh-century curia regis, through which all the important functions, deliberative, judicial, financial, and administrative, had been carried out. The curia had consisted partly of the territorial magnates, earls, and barons, who had been, or whose fathers had been, the King's comitatus in battle; partly of knights still in attendance upon the King's person, and hoping some day, in reward for their services, to become territorial magnates in turn; partly, and to an increasing extent as government became more complicated and difficult, of clerks whose trained skill with the pen and with figures made them more practically useful than the lay knights in all those branches of affairs which entailed book-keeping and correspondence. All the members of the curia, in smaller or greater numbers, according to the magnitude of the business to be transacted and the willingness of the lords to leave their estates, sat with the King from time to time, and advised him as his consilium; but except on great occasions of state it was left to the knights to wait at his table and order his servants about, and to the clerks to write and send his letters, and to act as his assessors or his deputies in the exercise of justice or the collection and spending of his revenue. In course of time some of the functions of the original curia had become specialized in distinct departments, which acquired a permanent habitation at Westminster, ceased to follow the King's wanderings, and were no longer regarded as part of the personal Household. Thus the curia as a judicial body became the Courts of Law; the curia as a financial body became the Exchequer; while at a somewhat later date the Chancery undertook the double function of issuing royal grants and other formal correspondence of the Crown, and of supplementing the Courts of Law by exercising an equitable jurisdiction in cases which ordinary law was inadequate to cover. To the central curia or Household, still composed of lay and clerical officers lodged in the King's palace and eating in his hall, wherever that might happen to be, three things were left. It ministered to the material well-being and splendour of the Sovereign himself; it exercised under his personal direction such functions of administration, for example the control of foreign policy and war, as had not passed to the specialized departments; and, perhaps most important of all, it remained potentially able to resume at his will the exercise of functions precisely analogous to those which had so passed. This paradox of the duplicate exercise of royal functions, through the specialized departments and through the Household, lies at the bottom of an understanding of mediaeval government.

The differentiation of the Courts of Law, the Exchequer, and the Chancery from the Household was complete by the thirteenth century; but the same tendency towards the budding off of quasi-independent departments of state from the administrative nucleus continued to manifest itself in a minor degree up to and even, for all their centralizing instinct, within the period of the Tudors. Moreover, as the scale of the Household became larger and its individual ministers began to require assistance, there grew up a corresponding tendency towards the formation of separate offices within the nucleus itself. The staffing of these offices with servants of various grades, their responsibilities and interrelations, and the control of them through the chief officers of the Household, were determined by royal ordinances, which go into minute detail, and reveal a complex organization, based upon long-standing tradition, and at the same time flexible in its capacity of adaptation to shifting circumstances. The main structure of the Household, as we find it under Elizabeth, appears to have been already fixed in the time of Edward IV and even in that of Edward II, although minor changes had been introduced, largely through Tudor imitation of the French hôtel du roi, just as there had been minor changes under Richard II and his Lancastrian successors, some of which are noted to our advantage by a clerk of literary tastes, who about 1478 bethought him to compile in the so-called Liber Niger a systematic account or rationale of the establishment in which doubtless he played a part. And the beginnings of the same structure can be traced back farther still, through ordinances of Edward I in 1279 to the Constitutio Domus Regis as it stood at the end of Henry I's reign in 1135, and even perhaps, so far as the principal officers are concerned, to the Normanized Anglo-Saxon Court of pre-Conquest days. And after Elizabeth's reign the structure lasted, again with modifications of detail, for nearly two centuries more, until it was somewhat severely overhauled, in a moment of reforming zeal, by what is known as Burke's Act of 1782.[84] This conservatism of structure may perhaps justify us in finding an explanation of the tripartite character which the organization of the Household at every stage displays, as arising naturally out of the local arrangement of a primitive royal habitation. The palace stood in a court-yard, and it consisted essentially of a hall where the King feasted and took counsel with his comitatus, and of a chamber where he retired to sleep and to be private, and where he probably kept his treasure-chest. The duties of his personal servants fell either in the court-yard or in the hall or in the chamber. In the court-yard the constabularii drilled the royal body-guard and the marescalli looked after the horses; in the hall the dapiferi and the pincernae ministered food and drink; in the chamber the camerarii or cubicularii, aided as time went on by the clerici, watched the King's treasure and his bed, and stood ready to receive and transmit his personal mandates. Originally, it would seem, there were several officers of each class. Afterwards they were reduced to one, or one was chosen as magister over the rest; whatever the process, a single chief officer, with a group of subordinates beneath him, emerges as representative of each of the three departments. Perhaps the change was assisted by the demand of the barons, jealous of the rise in their absence of new men at Court, to have Household posts conferred upon them as part of their hereditaments. By the middle of the twelfth century there were already a hereditary Great Chamberlain, a High Steward, a High Constable, a Chief Butler, and an Earl Marshal.[85] But, obviously, if the King was in the habit of appointing two chamberlains or two stewards, he could make one of each pair hereditary, and still have another at his own appointment. And he could call on the hereditary officer to officiate on state occasions and the appointed officer to officiate in daily life. The hereditary man would have the greater dignity and the appointed man the greater power. This, rather than deputation by the hereditary officers, seems to be the explanation of the existence of a Chamberlain of the Household side by side with the Lord Great Chamberlain and of a Steward of the Household side by side with the Lord High Steward. It is really only another example of the duplication of functions, through officers of state on the one hand, and Household officers on the other, to which attention has already been called; with the added feature that in this case the officers of state seem to have had sinecures from the beginning.

The tripartite organization is traceable clearly enough in the Household of Elizabeth, as in that of her predecessors. There was, of course, a close co-operation at many points between the different departments; and, indeed, the simplicity of the original scheme had inevitably been interfered with, as the sovereigns began more and more to retire from their hall and to subdivide their chamber in order to adapt it to the complicated needs of an increasingly luxurious private life. The department of the court-yard, moreover, would appear, long before Elizabeth's time, to have shed many of what must be supposed to have been its original functions. The hereditary Lord High Constable had left no constabularius behind him at court, and although the Earl Marshal, also hereditary, continued to exercise certain functions, such as an oversight over the heralds, he was in no sense the head of a Household department. The Knight Marshal, who exercised a jurisdiction over breaches of peace within the verge (virgata) of twelve leagues round the court, was nominally at least his deputy, but the only other marshals in the Household were officers of the Hall. Similarly the oversight of the guard seems to have passed to the Chamberlain. Nor had the Marshal any longer the responsibility for the stable which the etymology of his name suggests.[86] The Stable was, indeed, still a distinct department, but its head was the Master of the Horse, who, although he ranked as one of the three chief officers of the Household, was of comparatively recent origin.[87]

By a somewhat troublesome variation in the use of terms, the Lord Steward's department is sometimes called the 'Household' in a very narrow sense, which excludes the Chamber and the Stable. The author of the Liber Niger distinguishes it as the domus providentiae from the Chamber as the domus magnificentiae.[88] Roughly speaking, it concerned itself with the material necessities, the food and drink, the lighting and the fuel, of the Sovereign and his court, while all else that ministered to his personal life and the dignity of his state, his lodging and his apparel, his entertainments, his study and his recreations, fell within the sphere of the Chamber. Its original nucleus was still represented under Elizabeth by the officers of the Hall, Marshals, Sewers, and Surveyors; but the Hall had shrunk in importance since the Sovereign had ceased to dine in it, and some of these posts had long been duplicated within the Chamber itself, and even there were tending to become honorific rather than effective.[89] The real functions of the department were now exercised in the subsidiary offices of provision, which had grown up round the Hall. Of these there were twenty, each under a Serjeant or other head with an appropriate staff of clerks, yeomen, grooms, pages, and children. They were the Kitchen, the Bake-house, the Pantry, the Cellar, the Buttery, the Pitcher-house, the Spicery, the Chandlery, the Wafery, the Confectionery, the Ewery, the Laundry, the Larder, the Boiling-house, the Accatry, the Poultry, the Scalding-house, the Pastry, the Scullery, and the Woodyard. The department also included the Almonry under a Lord High Almoner, who was an ecclesiastic, and the Porters. Administrative control was exercised by the Board of Green Cloth, consisting of the Treasurer and Comptroller of the Household, and the Cofferer or household cashier.[90] These had the assistance of a staff of clerks and clerk comptrollers, known as the Counting House. Above all was the chief officer of the department, the Lord Steward of the Household. The Steward, whose name seems to be an exact equivalent for both the Latin terms dapifer and Senescallus, is not likely to have had in the beginning any priority over the camerarius; but historical reasons had brought him to the forefront towards the end of the thirteenth century, and thereafter he continued to rank as first officer of the Household. Henry VIII, following a French analogy, had renamed him Grand Master of the Household, but the new term had not permanently succeeded in establishing itself. Under Elizabeth the post was sometimes left vacant. But it was always filled during the session of a Parliament, for it was the ancient custom for the lords of Parliament to dine at the Lord Steward's table in the court.[91] In the absence of a Lord Steward, the department was managed, under some general supervision from the Lord Chamberlain, who then became first officer, by the Treasurer and Comptroller, who were important personages with seats on the Privy Council. The original dapiferi had had as colleagues the pincernae, but the Chief Butlership was now an hereditary sinecure, and the duties were divided between the subordinate office of the Cellar and the Cupbearer, who was an officer of the Chamber.

We come now to the Lord Chamberlain, incomparably the most important figure at court in all matters concerned with entertainments. The camerarii and cubicularii are discernible before the Conquest, and the corresponding Anglo-Saxon terms appear to be burþegn, bedþegn, and hræglþegn. Perhaps the hrægl or wardrobe was already becoming separated from the bur or bed-chamber.[92] In the days of William Rufus one Herbert was regis cubicularius et thesaurarius.[93] This was before the Exchequer under its Lord High Treasurer had branched off as a separate department of state, but the post of Chamberlain of the Exchequer continued for many centuries to testify to the original location of the treasure chest in the camera. About 1135 there was a magister camerarius, the equal in salary and allowances of the cancellarius, the dapiferi, the magister pincerna, the thesaurarius, and the constabularii. There were also other camerarii of lower degrees taking turns of duty, and a special camerarius candelae, ranking lower still.[94] Presumably the magister camerarius became the hereditary Lord Great Chamberlain, whose coronation services, which are connected with the charge of the King's bed-chamber, the handing of a basin and towel at the banquet, and the preparation of the royal oblations, afford a sufficient indication of the duties of the court office.[95] And on the retirement of the hereditary officer from court, it seems probable that one of the other camerarii advanced to the position of acting magister. At any rate, when the treatise known as Fleta was compiled about 1290, there was a single camerarius with a sub-minister and other officers beneath him. Perhaps he was by this time barely the equal of the senescallus, to whom he sat as assessor in the court de placitis Aulae Regis, although he had also an independent jurisdiction over his own officers and those of the Wardrobe, who were exempt from the Steward's court.[96] On the other hand he was, as Robert of Westminster calls him, 'custos capitis regis', and the author of Fleta tells us in another connexion that 'in hospitio pro regula habetur, quod quanto propinquior sit quis Regi, tanto dignior'.[97] On the whole it seems probable that, whatever his traditional status may have been, the practical tendency of the extensive political use made by Edward I of the Steward and the clerical officers of the Wardrobe was to throw the Chamberlain into the background.[98] We also learn from Fleta that it was the business of the Chamberlain to look after the King's bed and chamber, and that as fees he had his keep in court, fines from ecclesiastic and lay homagers, the disused plenishings of the camera, and a share of all gifts and offerings of food made to the King.[99]