In his account of the English Civil War, looking back at his youth and attempting to make sense of the years we now acknowledge as one of the cataclysmic eras of English history, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, focused on the institution that had dominated his public life. The Court, he wrote, like ‘a mirror’, ‘measured the temper and affection of the country’. ‘Court’ was a powerful word as well as a powerful institution in the Baroque era; it accumulated around itself ideas and feelings that were often contradictory, but were always compelling. Men and women ‘swarmed’ to the Court (the hyperbolic metaphor is a favourite one) for power, gain, gossip, titles, rewards, and entertainment. The Court is Gabriel Harvey's ‘only mart of preferment and honour’; it is Donne's ‘bladder of Vanitie’; it is one of the places of ‘wickedness and vice’ for inhabiting which Raleigh in his execution speech prays he will be forgiven; it is the precarious place in which Mary Wroth was accused of ‘dancing in a net’.

What powers, real or imputed, did the Court have over the destinies and allegiances of men and women? How did this dominant cultural apparatus control the specifics of living? What underlying and recurring anxieties and affirmations are associated with the Court?