A Theater of Diplomacy. Ellen R. Welch
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the context of the highly public, theatrical culture of the court, privacy and intimacy were powerful alternative forms of performance. Exclusive proximity to a monarch conferred favor on an individual.97 For those excluded, the private meetings constructed restricted, forbidden spaces and an attendant desire to penetrate them. Finding out what happened behind closed doors was a major part of diplomats’ jobs.98 Diplomatic correspondence reveals that secrets at the Bayonne conference did not last long. Charles’s meeting with the Ottoman envoy, for example, was not officially disclosed to the Spanish delegation. The royal family reserved lodgings for the envoy under a false name and Charles met with him at some distance from the site of the summit. Nevertheless, Spanish envoys learned of the meeting and the Spanish ambassador in London confirmed it to Philip in a June 25 letter.99 From a diplomat’s perspective, a secret’s importance lies not only in the information being withheld but also in the information implied by choices regarding its concealment and discreet revelation. The measures taken to hide the Ottoman envoy from Spanish attendees constituted another kind of performance to be interpreted.
Diplomats and nondiplomatic commentators occupied space on a “continuum of suspicion” with regard to their interpretations of the events at Bayonne. French Protestants, situated on the extreme edge of this spectrum, remained deeply mistrustful of the Catholic monarchs’ motives and fixated on signs of secrecy and concealment. Protestant historian De Thou described the architecture of Bayonne, especially the royal family’s dwelling arrangements, as a mise-en-scène of secrecy. He explains that Catherine took over the bishop’s palace and had a new wooden house built “in haste” (à la hâte) right next door and richly furnished for her daughter. A gallery connected the two dwellings such that “the queen mother often went to see the queen her daughter during the nights … and she was only seen by those in her confidence. There, she conferred in secret with Elisabeth and the Duke of Alba who had the full powers of the king of Spain.”100 Immediately after this description, he recounts Protestant suspicions that at Bayonne the French and Spanish monarchs pledged mutual support in suppressing Huguenots in France and the Low Countries, respectively. Those speculations appear authorized by the analysis of invisibility and concealment that precedes them.
The Protestant discourse on Bayonne demonstrates—albeit in extreme form—how the very ambiguity that ensured the festivities’ utility for diplomatic purposes ultimately escaped French monarchal control. The capacity of the entertainments to restrict particular interpretations to particular viewers was to some degree canceled out by the abundance of other possible forms of reception. In other cases, it gave rise to speculation and a degree of paranoia that ran counter to the French agenda. The performance of concord, in other words, not only glossed over discord but in fact allowed discord to proliferate through suspicious interpretations of the polysemous event.
Conclusion: Analyzing Concordant Discord
This fragmented reception of the Bayonne festivities is itself concealed from the most famous traces of the event: the spectacular tapestries discussed at the beginning of the chapter. Created several years after the Bayonne meeting, years even after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre that its most paranoid commentators saw as its ultimate result, the tapestries present a remarkably unified portrait of the entertainments. The composition draws all eyes to the wondrous spectacles at their center, testaments to the Valois family’s splendor.101 As Roy Strong suggests, they also serve as “tangible monuments” to the culture of court spectacle itself.102 In monumentalizing court entertainments, the tapestries depict them as singular, experienced in the same way by all observers. As this discussion reveals, this retrospective image does not completely correspond to the complex practices of observation, mediation, and interpretation mobilized by the entertainments in their own time.
The Bayonne festivities and their publication across Europe illustrate some of the diplomatic uses of the performing arts in the political and aesthetic contexts of the mid-sixteenth century. The strong cultural and familial ties among the aristocracies of western European countries, the continued importance of Catholic traditions, and the predominance of neo-Platonic theories and belief in the universality of the arts all conspired to make performances a powerful ritual affirming the unity of neighboring kingdoms despite their political differences. Yet alongside this feeling and image of community, spectators hailing from different countries and different social positions, armed with different linguistic and cultural competencies, could derive varying political interpretations from the festivities’ pompous displays. These diverse interpretations gained solidity and force in post-event accounts, particularly those distributed by the French royal family, carefully tailored to enhance political relations with each reader. The staging and mediation of the entertainments involved a complex balancing act of concealing and revealing, consolidation and dispersal. Analyzing performance in a diplomatic context requires a similar balancing act, as well as a level of comfort with uncertainty, obscurity, and multiplicity of meanings. Ambiguity is not (or not only) an assumed quality of art but a pragmatic strategy and a complement to diplomatic negotiation.
Recognizing the diplomatic multiplicity of entertainments such as those staged at Bayonne also entails imagining a more active role for spectators. Diplomats in the audience made strategic choices in interpreting entertainments and in recounting them to their sovereigns and secretaries. They exercised discretion even in the way they attended or participated in performances, conscious of the symbolism inherent in each act of sociability. The specificity of the diplomatic spectator’s point of view and the possibility of theorizing an active, “diplomatic” mode of spectatorship are the focus of the next chapter.
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