“Studious Retirement” 1632–1638the discordant elements represented in the antimasques – unruly passions, discon-
tented and mutinous elements in the populace, and threats from abroad. At the end
the royal and noble masquers unmasked and participated with other members of
the court in elaborate dances (the Revels), figuring the continual intermixing of the
ideal world and the Stuart court. Also, Cavalier poets associated with the court
wrote lyrics imbued with the fashionable Platonism and pastoralism, or with a play-
ful licentiousness.
During the 1630s King Charles sought to extend the cultural control of the court
and the Laudian church throughout the country. He reissued Jacobean proclama-
tions commanding gentry and nobility back to their country estates to keep hospi-
tality in the traditional fashion, especially at festival times of Christmas and Easter.
On October 18, 1633 he reissued James I’s highly controversial Book of Sports.
Citing the common people’s need for exercise and recreation, the document urges
the continuance of traditional rural sports and festivities in every parish after divine
service on Sunday:
For our good people’s lawful recreation, our pleasure likewise is, that after the end of
divine service our good people be not disturbed, letted or discouraged from any
lawful recreation, such as dancing, either men or women; archery for men, leaping,
vaulting, or any other such harmless recreation, nor from having of May-games,
whitsunales, and Morris-dances; and the setting up of May-poles and other sports
therewith used.^14In the same proclamation he called upon bishops to constrain “all the Puritans and
precisians” either to conform or leave the country, and so strike down “the con-
temners of our authority and adversaries of our Church.” This ordinance links
Laudian church ritual with traditional rural festivities, making them instruments of
royal authority and control under the careful supervision of parish clergy.
Puritans denounced both court and country sports on religious grounds: they
saw masques, maypoles and morrises as palpable occasions of sin and the royally
prescribed recreations as profanations of the Sabbath. Nor were they unaware of
the politics of the king’s festivals. The contemporary Puritan historian Lucy
Hutchinson saw masques and sports as a vehicle for spreading the court’s immoral-
ity and idolatry throughout the kingdom, distracting people from true religion and
from the political crisis:
The generality of the gentry of the land soone learnt the Court fashion, and every
greate house in the country became a sty of uncleannesse. To keepe the people in
their deplorable security till vengeance overtooke them, they were entertain’d with
masks, stage playes, and various sorts of ruder sports. Then began Murther, incest,
Adultery, drunkennesse, swearing, fornication and all sorts of ribaldry to be no conceal’d
but countenanced vices, favour’d wherever they were privately practis’d because they
held such conformity with the Court example.^15