Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) (20 page)

By the early eighteenth century, evening diversions and nocturnal entertainments such as gaming and dancing were considered typical of everyday life at court. In his
Introduction to the Knowledge of Ceremony of Great Rulers
(1729) Julius Bernhard von Rohr distinguishes between orderly and disorderly courts, based on the regular division of the day: “At some courts … a certain hour is set at which the princely rulers and their servants take their rest, and in the morning arise from their beds.” Fixed schedules made for orderly court life, but the pursuit of pleasure meant indulgent disorder. “The night is turned into day and the day into night” at these disorderly courts, where “a large part of the time meant for nightly rest” is spent “in eating, drinking, gambling, dancing and other divertissements” by courtiers who “then sleep almost until noon.”
¹⁰²

In his
Introduction to the Knowledge of Ceremony of Great Rulers
, Rohr’s criticism of night life at court is circumspect, typical of his tone when discussing “great rulers.” Rohr’s comments on dancing in the companion volume to the
Great Rulers
, his
Introduction to the Knowledge of Ceremony of Private Persons
(
Einleitung zur Ceremoniel-Wissenschaft der Privat-Personen
, 1728) show how disturbing the new uses of the night could be:

The balls of the well-born or the common dancing-parties are held at just that time of terror and darkness when the spirit of darkness rules: [he] arranges these [dances], and he is obeyed there … The darkness, the snares, the masks behind which one hides often permit shameful liberties.
¹⁰³

According to Rohr, the grave moral dangers of dancing arose because “one goes too far with regard to the hour, one does not stop at the proper time, [and so] the night, which was made by God for rest, is transformed by this sensuality into day.”
¹⁰⁴
In his guide to comportment for “private persons” Rohr presents a general critique of the disorder of nocturnal sociability. Late hours at coffeehouses and nocturnal funerals also come under his criticism as widespread but improper uses of the night.

Rohr’s association of night life with the well-born is reflected in the London diary (1717–21) of William Byrd of Virginia (1674–1744). After noting his attention to his evening prayers consistently for several weeks, Byrd attended a masquerade on February 6, 1718:

I dressed myself in the habit of the Marquis and went to Mrs. B-r-t, and from thence to Lady Guise’s, and from thence to Lady Foley’s, and at about ten went to the masquerade, where I was well diverted … I stayed till 6 o’clock [a.m.], having kept up my spirits with chocolate. I neglected my prayers, for which God forgive me.
¹⁰⁵

Phillip Balthasar Sinold warned his readers of this new temptation to late hours. The division between day and night, he reminded his readers, was created by God as “a special sign of his unfathomable wisdom.” Sinold then related how this divine order is ignored by two exemplary members of the “so-called beautiful world,” Clorinde and Cleomenes. The two are censured equally by Sinold for staying out “nearly until morning” dancing, gossiping, and gambling, completely forgetting their evening and morning prayers, to the detriment of their bodies and souls. Their evening socializing (commencing “after seven o’clock”) is an “assembly of vanity.”
¹⁰⁶
“One must realize,” Sinold added,

that such nocturnal gatherings are allowed and approved in Christendom, while in contrast gatherings meant for the practice of piety [i.e., Pietist conventicles], even when they take place in broad daylight are in most places entirely forbidden.
¹⁰⁷

Moralists like Rohr and Sinold decried the “everyday” nature of aristocratic night life, which went far beyond the occasional use of the night at festivals or celebrations. In a tension typical of the baroque,
the exclusivity and prestige of nocturnal sociability immediately evoked warnings about the illusions and deceit the night fostered.

The melancholy warnings of Rohr and Sinold about the moral dangers of “night life” contrast with the more sanguine comments of Johann Michael von Loen in his essay on
The Court at Dresden in the Year 1718
(
Der Hof zu Dresden, Im Jahr 1718
, 1749). Loen, drawing on his experiences at the opulent court of Augustus II in 1718 and 1723, describes a series of nocturnal festivities and celebrations, culminating in the Carnival season of 1723. During Carnival “every evening the so-called
Redutten
or public dances were [held]” in a “hall illuminated with countless lights.” Despite the unrestrained nightly festivities, Loen points out that in Dresden “business went on uninterrupted”:

Though a part of the night was spent with all manner of festivities, on the next morning one saw that every man was back at his post: the merchant in his stall, the soldier on guard, the clerks in the chancellery, the councilors in their meetings and the jurists in their chambers.
¹⁰⁸

The duties of daily life had come to accommodate nocturnal revelry: “only certain beauties and wandering cavaliers who had no service” stayed in bed until noon.
¹⁰⁹
Writing in the 1730s, the courtier-author Karl Ludwig Freiherr von Pöllnitz (1692–1775) considered the late hours described here to be the norm. Pöllnitz was a vagabond courtier who visited every major court in Europe, supporting himself by gambling and publishing gossipy accounts of court romances and intrigues. At the modest court of Modena in the early 1720s he was received with all due respect by the ruling duke (Rinaldo D’Este, 1695–1737) but the “quiet” court life there drew his ridicule. He described it as nearly monastic and “inspiring melancholy”: “one rises there early in the morning, goes to mass, and dines promptly at a good hour; afternoons, one takes a stroll. In the evening one plays a few games; dinner is at eight o’clock, and around ten o’clock one goes to sleep.” Pöllnitz decried “this miserable way to live in monotony … which is simply not appropriate for a ruler’s court.”
¹¹⁰
These early hours were the antithesis of the nocturnal display of aristocratic style and royal majesty essential to the life of the court.

This evidence of the nocturnalization of spectacular celebrations, theatrical performances, and everyday pleasures at court could be easily multiplied, but the question would remain: why did darkness and the night become so important to the spectacles, pleasures, and daily life of Northern European court society in the seventeenth century? No single answer could address the broad international phenomenon examined here, but I suggest that new demands on the representation of power, majesty, and hierarchy explain much of the development.

The nocturnalization of political imagery and court life in the seventeenth century reflects both challenges faced by rulers and their responses to these challenges. The counterintuitive association of kings and queens not with the sun, but with darkness and the night, arose in part from what John Dryden called “adversities to Scepters,” which abounded in the seventeenth century. Sovereigns found themselves eclipsed, as Samuel Pordage explained in “A Panegyrick” on the Stuart Restoration (1660): “Our regall
Sun
, since
Charles
the first was slain, / Ecclips’d has been, but now shines bright again.”
¹¹¹
In an ode “To The Most High and Mighty Monarch,” Thomas Pecke summed up the execution of Charles I and the Commonwealth in the same terms:

The man-headed Rabble was the
Moon
,

Eclips’d our
Sun
; and made a glorious Noon,

Cover its white skin with a
Midnight
vail:

For the old
Serpent
, was the
Dragons Tail
;

And a pretended
Parliament
, the Head:

Hic sita est
:
Great Britain here lies dead
.
¹¹²

George Herbert, a poet of the divine night, provides an early example of the extension of the use of darkness as contrariety to political rhetoric. In a poem of 1621–22 in praise of Elizabeth Stuart, exiled queen of Bohemia (and daughter of James I), Herbert claims that “Through that black tiffany [the color of mourning or defeat], thy vertues shine / Fairer and richer” and that despite her exile from her kingdoms, Elizabeth’s “undivided majesty” is only enhanced by this hardship “as lights do gather splendours from darkness.”
¹¹³
Writing in the early seventeenth
century, Herbert’s use of darkness to praise an earthly ruler looks ahead to the political uses of darkness and the night in the century to come.

The political misfortunes of the Stuarts did not cease with the exile of Elizabeth from Bohemia. The vicissitudes of Charles I led royalists to claim that “we best read lustre in the shade” because “Ecclipse and suff’rings burnish Majesty.”
¹¹⁴
The Cavalier poet John Cleveland juxtaposed the incognito Charles with the Divine Word: “Methinks in this your dark mysterious dress / I see the Gospel couched in parables.”
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Henry Vaughan’s “The King Disguis’d” (1646) presaged Vaughan’s loftier words on darkness and the Divine. He praised the fugitive king, who on April 27, 1646 had fled Oxford disguised as a gentleman’s servant: “But full as well may we blame Night, and chide / His Wisdom, who doth light with darkness hide.”
¹¹⁶
The mysteries of the king’s flight were as impenetrable and inexpressible as those of the Lord, leading Vaughan to a dusky, apophatic political rhetoric:

Poor, obscure shelter! if that shelter be

Obscure, which harbours so much Majesty.

Hence prophane Eyes! the mysterie’s so deep

Like Esdras’ books, the vulgar must not see’t.

…

Secrets of State are points we must not know;

This vizard is thy privy Councel now.

Vaughan’s references to
arcana imperii
, masking, obscurity, and the night summarize and justify the importance of illusion and deception in the political thought of the age.

Several poems celebrating the Stuart Restoration of 1660 drew on nocturnal themes, adapting images of the ascetic night and the epistemological night to the new monarch’s story. John Dryden’s “Astraea Redux” of 1660 sought to rehabilitate the “dark afflictions” of civil war, defeat, and exile suffered by Charles II:

Well might the Ancient Poets then confer

On Night the honour’d name of
Counseller
,

Since struck with rayes of prosp’rous fortune blind

We light alone in dark afflictions find.

In such adversities to Scepters train’d

The name of
Great
his famous Grandsire gain’d.

One of the very few women to publish in celebration of the arrival of Charles II, Rachel Jevon began her “Exultationis Carmen” (1660) succinctly with an epistemological night:

Dread Soveraign
CHARLES
! O King of Most Renown!

Your Countries Father; and Your Kingdoms Crown;

More Splendid made by dark Afflictions Night;

Live ever Monarch in Coelestial Light:

In his “Ode, Upon the Blessed Restoration” Abraham Cowley saw the “greatness” and “majesty” of Charles II in the wake of his defeat by Cromwell at the Battle of Worcester in 1651. Cowley draws on the vocabulary of “black Fate,” clouds, and shrouds to praise the king:

No show on Earth can sure so pleasant prove,

As when they
great misfortunes
see

With
Courage
born and
Decency
.

So were they
born
when
Worc’ster
’s dismal
Day

Did all the terrors of
black Fate
display.

So were they born when no
Disguises clowd

His
inward Royalty
could
shrowd
,

And one of th’
Angels
whom just
God
did send

To guard him in his noble flight,

(A
Troop
of
Angels
did him then attend)

Assur’d me in a
Vision
th’ other night,

That
He
(and who could better judge than
He
?)

Did then more
Greatness
in him see,

More
Lustre
and more
Majesty
,

Than all his
Coronation Pomp
can shew to
Human Eye
.

Dryden and Jevon emphasize an ascetic “dark Afflictions Night” which makes the true majesty of the monarch “more splendid”; Cowley focuses in this passage on the power of darkness to reveal the “greatness” of Charles II in defeat – an insight granted to the poet, one notes, through the conceit of “a Vision th’ other night.”

Similar aspects of the ascetic and epistemological night were deployed in French royal imagery as well, especially in the aftermath of the Fronde. The Fronde’s challenge to royal authority was answered on many levels, not least in the court ballets of Isaac de Benserade. In contrast with his predecessors, Benserade commented fairly directly
on national politics and the court in the libretti he wrote for the ballets. In Benserade’s verses for the
Ballet de la Nuit
of 1653, the king, representing a torch, refers to the Fronde as “the recent shadows / that were so celebrated” (part 3, sixth entry). “Alas!” he exclaims, “how many of the unwary … have taken false
ardents
!” Lost in the darkness of the Fronde, his subjects exclaim: “the true one frees us from them / lighting our path.”
¹¹⁷
In several scenes, the king’s verses show how his victory over “all my rebels / fought and subdued” manifests his greatness – but each of these scenes is set at night. In the final scene of the
Ballet de la Nuit
the king, dancing as the rising sun, actually evokes future “shadows upon France” that he “will dispel,” thus tying the future of the sun king to the shadows he will overcome.
¹¹⁸