Page:The Elizabethan stage (Volume 1).pdf/256

204 of nicely graded dignity, 'not right out, but byas forward'. The ambassadorial suites appear to have been accommodated in boxes raised above the level of the state, to the right and left. Guests of honour, but of lesser honour, might be placed on special benches assigned to lords and privy councillors. Evidently the masks were solemn occasions, and the laws of precedence strictly followed. An allusion in The Maid's Tragedy suggests that ladies, other than those ladies of the court and ambassadors' wives who formed the king's 'troop', were ordinarily seated in the galleries. One of the principal objects of the masks was the entertainment of ambassadors, and the jealousies amongst them were constantly involving James and his Council in awkward diplomatic questions. These have recently been the subject of a special study, and need not here be described in detail. By far the most important was the standing conflict for precedence between the representatives of France and Spain. James consistently refused to commit himself to either claim, and was careful not to invite both ambassadors to the same function. But some occasions were more honourable than others, and it seems clear that in the minds of the ambassadors themselves the bestowal or withholding of an invitation often counted for a diplomatic triumph or rebuff. Matters were complicated during the earlier years of the reign by Anne's far from discreet advocacy of the Spanish cause, and the dispatches of M. de Beaumont in 1605 and M. de la Boderie in 1608 are largely occupied with the embarrassment caused to James and the humiliation inflicted upon those ambassadors themselves by the Queen's determination that her masks should be graced by the presence of the astute and courtly Spaniard, Juan de Taxis. In the latter year James had to stave off an open rupture with Henri IV by an opportune demand for the repayment of a long-standing debt. The relations between France and Spain were paralleled by similar feuds for precedence between Venice and Flanders and between Florence and Savoy, while the King of Spain was naturally unwilling that his representative should be received on terms of equality with the representative of Holland and thus appear to acknowledge the claims of rebellious provinces to