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THE ALLEYNIAN 709
OPINION, INTERVIEWS & FEATURES
The extraordinary portrait of Henry Frederick, Stuart Prince of Wales, which hangs in the South Block stairwell, is worth more than a cursory glance by those students who pass it daily, says Jan Piggott , former Head of English and previous Keeper of the Archives
In the South Block hall, as you pass the Day House scoreboards before walking upstairs for a History lesson, the mobile phone in your pocket turned off, please log on to that Facebook portrait, high up: Henry Frederick, Stuart Prince of Wales (1594–1612) (see right). His Highness died at 18 of typhoid, your fellow Sixth Former, as it were; historians say we lost a noble Henry IX and got Charles I, his tragic younger brother. A mile of 2,000 mourners in black walked at his funeral. There was more grief than for Gloriana: many poets wrote elegies, such as John Donne and George Herbert, lachrymose in Latin. Sir Walter Raleigh, though imprisoned by James at the Tower, where he was sought out for advice by the Prince, was indeed writing The Historie of the World explicitly for his young patron. However, Raleigh abandoned the projected second and third volumes, ending his chronicle (so critical of monarchs) abruptly: since God had taken away that glorious Prince , something vnspeakable and neuer enough lamented , he was left tearful as Job in the Bible. For Henry, the King his father wrote Basilikon Doron , read over all Europe, about how to be King – Christian, peaceful and just. Henry’s mother, Queen Anne, was the King of Denmark’s sister; his godmother was Elizabeth I. He received the Order of the Garter at 10 years old. Sporting and martial, he was also highly cultivated. The household of this teenage heir to the throne at St James’s Palace in 1610, numbering nearly 500, was referred to as a ‘collegiate court’, entertaining academics, churchmen, scientists, soldiers and explorers. Henry’s was the first serious Royal Library and Collection, with works of art from the continent, Greek and Roman coins and 10,000 medals. Lavish entertainments and patronage rivalled the Medicean and Prague courts. He intended to defeat the might of Catholic Spain, discover the North-West Passage and colonise Virginia; his carved and gilded ships were magnificent, as were his palaces and gardens. Edward Alleyn bequeathed this portrait to Dulwich College. Alleyn, impresario in the entertainment industry, was ‘Master of the King’s Games of Bears, Bulls and Dogs’. Howard, the Armada Lord High Admiral, was patron of Alleyn’s acting company, which the King assigned to Prince Henry; Alleyn and ‘the Prince’s Players’ wore Henry’s scarlet livery in the coronation procession. Arriving from Scotland at nine years old, Henry attended a private royal family treat, Alleyn’s production of a Lion Hunt inside the chambers and stairs of the Tower; afterwards he ordered Alleyn never to allow the English mastiff who had fought the King of Beasts to fight any inferior creature. Henry also attended the welcome that Alleyn (already called ‘servant to the young Prince’) gave the King. Alleyn delivered a stirring speech, written by Ben Jonson, on behalf of the city from a triumphal arch in the streets. Alleyn was involved with Inigo Jones in Jonson’s court masques, which would have out-dazzled Las Vegas floor-shows. They involved poetry, song, dance, elaborate moving scenery and coloured lights; allegory and mythology asserted political and ideological themes. On New Year’s Day, 1611, at the Whitehall Banqueting House, Prince Henry himself performed the title role in Oberon , Spenserian knight and Roman imperator. The Prince was pulled in a chariot by two polar bears Alleyn
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Alleyn and ‘the Prince’s Players’ wore Henry’s scarlet livery in the coronation procession
AFTER ISAAC OLIVER (1565–1617), HENRY, PRINCE OF WALES. ‘THE FLOWER OF HIS HOUSE, THE GLORY OF HIS COUNTRY AND THE ADMIRATION OF ALL FOREIGNERS.’
Portrait of a prince
probably brought (recently acquired) from his stinking, noisy Bear Garden on Bankside (rather near Tate Modern). The Prince’s Barriers , also by Jonson, boasted about a Stuart revival of chivalry and glorious Arthurian Britain, with England, Scotland and Ireland united; this was combined with an absurd indoor jousting tournament lasting till dawn – a ‘Have at You’ across something like a tennis net, where Henry himself took 32 pike- pushes and 360 sword-strokes. About 10 years after Henry died, Alleyn wrote regretting the loss of his ‘most excellent Master’ who would have backed him up in some legal difficulty. In the portrait above, Henry practises military exercises, posed à l’antique in cuirass with his tiltyard lance. ‘Second to no Prince in Christendom’ as horseman, this muscular Christian would have made an obvious School Captain at Dulwich (in spite of his birth), balancing the intellectual and the sporting in a way Wodehouse would have approved in his Dulwich College school stories about the conflict between Sports and Study. Ben Jonson wrote how Yo r favor to letters [literature] & those gentler studies, that goe under the title of Humanitye, is not the least honor of yo r wreath . Prince Henry was the antithesis of his father, who was seen to envy his popularity. In manner he was reserved; he enjoyed solitary walks at Richmond Palace on Thames-bank by moonlight, listening to his trumpeters and kettle-drummers.
INIGO JONES (1573–1652), COSTUME DESIGN FOR PRINCE HENRY AS OBERON , 1610.
© The Devonshire Collections. Reproduced with permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees
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