At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (33 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

KNIGHTWALKERS:
PRINCES AND PEERS

I

. . . Come,

Let’s have one other gaudy night. Call to me

All my sad captains. Fill our bowls once more.

Let’s mock the midnight bell.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
1606–1607
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D
URING THE LATE
Middle Ages, princes and knights laid claim to night’s domain. Across the darkened countryside, distant fortresses stood as lonely outposts of light, their turrets and parapets aglow with blazing torches. Nocturnal displays of princely power were grand spectacles of self-indulgence, festive evenings when nobles reveled within the great halls of their castles. Amid open fires, candles, and flambeaux, enormous banquets, larded with game, testified to feudal extravagance. So it was that Charles VI of France (1368–1422) and his entourage, over four days in 1389, celebrated the Feast of Saint-Denis. Days of jousting ended each night with dance and drink. On the fourth evening, reported a chronicler, “The lords, making night into day, indulging in all the excesses of the table, were led by drunkenness into such disorders that, with no respect for the presence of the king, several of them profaned the holiness of the religious edifice and gave themselves up to libertinage and adultery.”
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In due course, with the appearance of court aristocracies by the sixteenth century, more refined entertainments arose within noble households. As military competition among lords diminished amid the emergence of strong nation-states, aristocratic life revolved around civil amusements at court, coupled with intellectual and artistic pursuits. At the same time, the growth of cities afforded less isolated settings for nocturnal merriment. Just as the upper classes proclaimed their power and wealth at night through public illuminations, so they appropriated evenings for private amusements, “lengthening out” their “pleasures,” to paraphrase a commentator. And whereas, initially, daytime, too, proved a popular venue for court diversions, night increasingly appealed to royal sensibilities. Noted a German writer, “They stay awake in order to indulge in their entertainments, though other people sleep.” Diversions distinguished elites from social subordinates, consigned by necessity to their beds. “Instead of roaring, / We waste the night / In love and snoaring,” a commoner jests in
The Two Queens of Brentford
(1721). By contrast, wrote an observer in the mid-1600s, “Courtiers of both sexes turn night to day, and day to night.”
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Across Europe, from London to Vienna, noble courts staged lavish entertainments against the blackness of night. At a Florentine opera in 1661 entitled
The Horse Dance
, performed in a garden behind the palace of the Grand Duke, more than one thousand torches lined the arena as a “troope of horse” paraded to the music of over two hundred violas and violins. “Beyond all expression,” an English visitor marveled. Spectacular fireworks displays enjoyed immense popularity, as did theatrical performances utilizing new techniques of stage lighting. No paean more passionately proclaimed the aristocratic affinity for night than Isaac de Benserade’s
Le Ballet de la Nuit
(1653). Staged in honor of Louis XIV, it was the most lavish of Benserade’s early ballets. The young king himself appeared in several roles during the baroque spectacle, which featured lush costumes and opulent sets. Appropriately, the king in the final act donned a plumed headdress in the image of the rising sun. Although populated by beggars and thieves,
Le Ballet de la Nuit
offered a transcendent vision of nocturnal life, one replete with deities against the ornate backdrop of the heavens. Performed on several occasions, the ballet was a great favorite at court.
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Wolfgang Heimbach,
Nocturnal Banquet
, 1640.

Balls, concerts, and opera were among the principal nocturnal diversions of urban patricians, escorted in the comfort of coaches by armed servants with links. “Show, equipage, pomp, feasts,” and “balls,” described a writer. Toward the late seventeenth century, promenades of carriages along public walks captured aristocratic fancies. Renowned sites included the Prado in Madrid and St. James’s Park in London. Of the Voorhout in The Hague, a visitor remarked in 1697, “Everyone endeavoured to be the most admired for richnesse of liverie and number of footmen.”
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In the early eighteenth century, elegant amusements only proliferated, including illuminated pleasure gardens like Ranelagh and Vauxhall in London. “Ranelagh,” exclaims a wide-eyed admirer in Smollett’s Humphry Clinker, “looks like the inchanted palace of a genie, adorned with the most exquisite performances of painting, carving, and gilding, enlightened with a thousand golden lamps.” Elegance was paramount. Invited to an evening party in Palermo known as a
conversazione
, the Englishman William Beckford and a companion found themselves bereft of a coach. Alarmed by the public disgrace of arriving on foot, their Sicilian guide Philip went to heroic lengths en route, leading the pair without flambeaux through a maze of back lanes “only known to himself” in order to conceal their shame. Meanwhile, assemblies, or parties, among persons of quality acquired immense popularity from London to Moscow. In Paris, a traveler in 1717 found assemblies “every night,” as did a visitor to Prague. A London writer declared, “
Masquerades
, ridottos, operas, balls, assemblies, plays, the gardens, and every other big-swoln child of luxury, in the height of excess, becomes the proof of a taste for the elegancies of life.”
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Indeed, even nocturnal funerals, favored by some aristocratic families during the seventeenth century for their solemnity, became for others ostentatious exhibitions of wealth and privilege—“as much pomp as the vanity of man could wish,” derided a London resident in 1730. Upon the death of Cardinal Richelieu in 1642, more than two thousand candles and torches illuminated his cortège. Among Lutheran elites in Germany, the
Beisetzung
, or nocturnal burial, became a coveted honor for members of court society. In 1686, the Saxon Consistory complained to Elector John George III (1647–1691) that the “increasingly common nocturnal internments . . . are transforming Christian burial into a base carnal display.”
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II

Now is the wisht for time to crowne delight

Turne night to day and day into the night,

Prepare for stirring, masque, midnight revells,

All rare varietie to provoke desire.

NATHANIEL RICHARDS,
1640
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The preeminent entertainment during much of the early modern era was the masquerade. Long popular in European capitals, it provided a source of genteel amusement in England from the reign of
Henry V
III (1491–1547). The Elizabethan poet Thomas Campion wrote of “youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights.” Confined to courts and estates of the nobility, early masquerades were dramatic spectacles in which guests danced and performed in costume. Soon enough, dancing and conversation became their principal attractions, always, however, in some manner of disguise. For central to a masque’s mystique was anonymity, achieved by a vizard covering one’s face. In the same spirit, introductions were suspended between revelers, in sharp contrast to the requirements of formal etiquette.
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To understand a masquerade’s broad appeal, it is important to note the constraints of aristocratic life. Gentility and good manners defined the existence of courtiers, with elaborate canons to guide their words, gestures, and deeds. Success at court rested upon reserve and self-control, especially in the presence of superiors. No realm of personal behavior went unregulated, not even coughing and spitting. Ceremonious conduct, however feigned, was critical to preferment. Among the precepts in an early seventeenth-century conduct book, “A courtier must be serviceable to ladies & women of honour, dutiful to high officers, gracefull amongst councellers, pleasant among equalls, affable to inferiors, and curteous to all.” Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, contrasted aristocratic manners with the “natural behavior” of the lower classes: “Whereas the countrey peasants meet with such kind hearts and unconcerned freedom as they unite in friendly jollity, and depart with neighbourly love, the greater sort of persons meet with constrain’d ceremony, converse with formality, and for the most part depart with enmity.” In short, preferment and status rested upon theatrical “self-fashioning,” with courtiers playing contrived roles.
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Masquerades
, by contrast, afforded a hiatus from the repressive milieu of early modern courts. Baroque spectacles, they featured lavish costumes of silk and satin bathed in the brilliance of beeswax candles. But on several levels, masquerades represented dramatic departures from courtly etiquette. By stripping persons of their identity, they undermined distinctions between social ranks, with all revelers recreated equal. Within the privileged universe of aristocrats, this ramification was significant enough, but time would bring yet more sweeping changes. By the early eighteenth century, London was hosting midnight masques open, by ticket, to the general public so long as one arrived masked and unarmed. During one gathering, the ballroom was lit by five hundred candles, with women adorned in a “vast variety of dresses (many of them very rich).” Clearly, these remained grand entertainments, but with unprecedented opportunities for leveling. “A country of liberty,” pronounced a contemporary of the typical masque. Indeed, subscription masquerades arose in other cities, too. A writer in a Manchester newspaper predicted in 1755 the direst consequences:

Giuseppe Grisoni,
Masquerade at King’s Opera House
, 1724.

The masquerade houses may, with propriety enough, be called shops, where opportunities for immorality, prophaneness, obscenity, and almost every kind of vice, are retailed to any one who will become a customer; and at the low rate of seven and twenty shillings, the most abandon’d courtezan, the most profligate rake or common sharper, purchases the privilege of mingling with the first peers and peeresses of the realm.
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