Edward Corp. A Court in Exile: The Stuarts in France, 1689-1718. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xvi + 386 pp. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-58462-3.
Reviewed by Paul Monod (Department of History, Middlebury College)
Published on H-Albion (November, 2004)
The Court over the Water
A few years ago, no sensible member of the profession would have dared use the designation "court historian." It would have evoked the image of a reactionary snob chronicling the empty titles of sycophantic aristocrats. Today, court history is not just acceptable, it is thriving. Court historians hold conferences and have their own journal. The appearance in 1999 of a beautiful volume of essays entitled The Princely Courts of Europe: Ritual, Politics and Culture under the Ancien Regime, 1500 1789, brought the latest research in court history to a wide audience.[1]
This is all to the good, but court history still has intellectual problems to overcome. Most of its practitioners do not like models or theories. They prefer to study the individual structures and functions of courts, their rituals, ceremonies, entertainments, and the money that was spent on it all. Admittedly, the material is fairly intoxicating to any researcher, but the basic question that has not always been addressed is why courts mattered. To press the question further: did some courts matter more than others? And when exactly did they cease to matter: early in the eighteenth century; during the French Revolution; or as late as 1918?
Courts seem to have mattered because they provided rulers with the opportunity to express power, both political and cultural. When that power was lacking, or when princes and monarchs chose to express it in other ways, the court could quickly lose much of its importance. This suggests that courts were less institutional than episodic; their political and cultural significance depended largely on how the ruler was able, or willing, to use them. It also suggests that the success of courts depended on an audience, since power has to be projected towards somebody. Unfortunately, in many cases historians seem to have little idea of who composed that audience, apart from those who were physically present at the court.
Courts do not seem to have declined in a linear or progressive fashion. Some of them were rarely of much importance; others had flashes of brilliance between periods of relative obscurity. In western and central Europe, however, something seems to have happened to courts in the eighteenth century that diminished almost everything about them, except their snob appeal and impact on fashion. Why this occurred is a complicated problem. The growth of administrative bodies that were not dependent on the court was one factor; another was the tendency of eighteenth-century monarchs to represent themselves within the setting of the family rather than among courtiers. Artistic patronage had become more diffuse, and there were many more public venues in which entertainments were offered to the elite. It may also be the case that the audience for the court had become more skeptical about its rituals, due to the spread of enlightened ideas.
In Great Britain, partisan politics appear to have been a main factor in the decline of the court. Once political groups developed outside the court, they tended to undermine the effectiveness of the court in projecting its power, and shifted the focus of politics towards other bodies. The conflict between Whigs and Tories after 1679 seriously weakened the English court, and it seems never to have fully recovered.
Edward Corp's fascinating, well written, and thorough examination of the Stuart court in exile after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 presents a special case that casts light on many of the issues raised above. Corp is the majordomo of studies of the later Stuarts at the palace of St. Germain en Laye. An Englishman who lives and teaches in France, Corp has been writing on this subject for more than a decade, and he has an unrivaled knowledge of both French and English sources. In 1992, he edited the catalog for a major exhibition on the exiled court, held in conjunction with an international conference. The catalog contained a vast quantity of previously neglected information on the Stuarts at St. Germain. The book under review here surpasses the catalog in most respects (except perhaps in the lavishness of its illustrations, which are fewer and only in black and white). It contains detailed discussions of the structure and personnel of the court, its finances, its musical and artistic patronage, its poetic productions, and its Catholic piety. The history of James III's courts after 1712, at Bar le Duc, Avignon and Urbino, is briefly considered in later chapters. Without doubt, A Court in Exile will be the standard work on the subject for years to come.
Facing the advance of a Dutch army under William of Orange, James II went into exile in December 1688. Louis XIV obligingly loaned him the palace at St. Germain en Laye where the French king had spent much of his childhood, and gave him an annual pension to support his entourage. James brought with him a surprising number of members of his household, who were soon joined by other servants and pensioners. By the mid-1690s, about 1000 people were attached in some way to the court at St. Germain. Although the king's own household had been reduced to eighty-eight individuals, less than one sixth of its size in England before 1689, it retained its structure. This was a court with real importance, both politically and culturally. James and his queen, Mary of Modena, socialized on a regular basis with Louis XIV and members of the French royal family. Balls were held and operas performed at St. Germain, which became a center of Italian music and a lively place for young aristocrats to socialize, especially after the accession of James III in 1701. The Stuart court inspired the novelist Jane Barker and poets like Anthony Hamilton and John, Lord Caryll. Everything collapsed, however, after James III was sent to Bar le Duc in 1712, under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht. Although his mother remained at St. Germain with her household, the wandering Pretender maintained only a diminished retinue, which grew smaller as he traveled on to Avignon and Urbino. After the rebellion of 1715, moreover, Tory political leaders became dominant at James's little court, and began to drive out the Catholics who had remained loyal to his family for so many years. His English Catholic servants were gradually replaced by Scots and Irish exiles. This story is told by Corp clearly and with remarkable documentation.
The book is a collaborative effort, however, which creates some difficulties. The essay by Edward Gregg on the relations between France, Rome, and the exiled Stuarts is highly skeptical about the good intentions of Louis XIV towards James II and his successor. The chapters by Edward Corp, however, emphasize Louis's deep attachment to his Stuart cousins, which was based on their shared Catholicism. Corp may carry this interpretation too far when he assumes that the exile to Bar le Duc was engineered by Louis XIV in order to keep James III near the Channel ports. Geoffrey Scott has contributed a very fine chapter on James II's personal piety, but it would be interesting to know more about the religious observance of other members of the court. Did Catholicism at St. Germain remain "English," that is, focused on the household and hostile to the religious orders, or did it follow James II towards the new Catholic piety? The excellent chapter by Howard Erskine Hill on poetry at St. Germain opens up considerable new territory. It might have been paired, however, with a chapter on the novelist Jane Barker, whose works have recently gained a great deal of attention from literary scholars.
Nobody who reads this book will continue to think that the court at St. Germain was impoverished, boring, or full of spies. It remained important, politically and culturally, because some power still emanated from it. Its audience is not hard to identify: they were the Jacobite sympathizers of Great Britain and Ireland, about whom we hear too little in this volume. They still looked to the court of St. Germain as the household of the king, de jure if not de facto. Without its sympathizers back home, the Stuart court might have fallen quickly into irrelevance. Like all courts, however, St. Germain had to keep a distance between itself and its audience in order to preserve the illusion of royal power. When the Tory politicians arrived after 1715, they wrecked the exiled court, because they were used to more partisan ways of projecting authority. Through Edward Corp's beautifully produced book, however, we can appreciate once again just how impressive St. Germain was in its heyday.
Note
[1]. John Adamson, ed., The Princely Courts of Europe: Ritual, Politics and Culture under the Ancien Regime, 1500-1789 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999).
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Citation:
Paul Monod. Review of Corp, Edward, A Court in Exile: The Stuarts in France, 1689-1718.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
November, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=9978
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