Note 96 — Chapter XXXIV
Reading edition
A newsletter preserved in the British Museum, which has been published by Isaac Disraeli, in his Curiosities of Literature, gives the following account of this fête:
“Last Sunday, at night, the duke’s grace entertained their majesties and the French ambassador at York House with great feasting and show, when all things came down in clouds, among which one rare device was a representation of the French King and the two Queens [Anne of Austria and the Queen-Mother], with their chieftest attendants; and so to the life, that the Queen’s majesty could name them: it was four o’clock in the morning before they parted, and then the King and Queen, together with the French ambassador, lodged there. Some estimate this entertainment at five or six thousand pounds.”
Sir Philip Gibbs, in his admirable biography of Buckingham, says that this “rare device,” was a political allegory, arranged by the duke himself, with the assistance of his master of the ceremonies, Balthazar Gerbier. “It represented Maria de’ Medici, the Queen-Mother, enthroned in the midst of Neptune’s court upon the sea dividing England and France, and welcoming Frederick and Elizabeth of the Palatinate, with her three daughters and their husbands, the Kings of Spain and England and the Prince of Piedmont. It was Buckingham’s new ideal of foreign policy. France as the ally of England, the Elector Palatine restored to his throne, and peace with Spain. Buckingham’s ideal, alas! was no more substantial than the pasteboard and tinsel and flowing draperies of his actors, and, like the masque, a mockery.”