A Diminutive Courtier Thrives During Charles I’s Reign

LORD MINIMUS

The Extraordinary Life

of Britain’s Smallest Man

By Nick Page

St. Martin’s

262 pages, $16.95

You can see the diminutive courtier in portraitist Anthony van Dyck’s 1633 masterpiece “Queen Henrietta Maria With Jeffrey Hudson and an Ape,” recently on display at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino. The devoted wife of King Charles I, who would lose his head in the English civil war, Henrietta Maria surrounded herself with pets, exotic and domestic, animal and human. Jeffrey Hudson was her favorite dwarf.

British writer Nick Page, who tells Jeffrey’s story in “Lord Minimus,” probes the picture for clues: “Henrietta Maria is dressed in blue satin, which shimmers with light. She stares straight ahead, confident, calm, one hand resting gently on her pet monkey. She is informal, but in control....[Jeffrey’s] clothes are of a deep scarlet velvet ... his boots have spurs on them. If these were his real clothes--and there seems no reason to doubt it--he was riding and hunting by the time he was fourteen.... [I]n this portrait Jeffrey is a pet. He looks up anxiously at his royal mistress.... Like Pug the monkey, Jeffrey is in thrall. He may be sumptuously clothed, he may be skilled at hunting, he may have all the accouterments of a courtier, but he still has no will of his own....Yet he is not unhappy. There is anxiety in his eyes, but not fear and not unease.... All his energy is focused outwards, towards his mistress. He loves her and she loves him. But their love is not, and never would be, equal.”

If little is known about Hudson, that little is intensely dramatic. His rise from obscurity to fame begins in 1626, with 7-year-old, 18-inch Jeffrey concealed in a pie as a surprise present for the queen. And there are still more surprising turns in the years to come, with Hudson taking part in the English civil war, killing a man in a duel, being captured by pirates, sold into slavery and imprisoned. Page’s appendices feature two brief nonfiction accounts of Hudson’s life written in the later part of the 17th century, as well as a more fanciful cameo of him that appears in one of Sir Walter Scott’s novels.

Opting for fact rather than fiction, Page reconstructs Hudson’s life and times. Since he left no letters or diaries, Page fleshes out his story by summoning up the world in which he existed: the poverty and filth in which most people lived, the lavishness of the royal court, the perils of sea travel, the dangers of war and the tensions between Catholics and Protestants, the royal court and the rest of the country and between parliament and a king who sincerely believed he ruled by divine right.

Despite the paucity of information about Hudson, Page manages to provide us with some sense of his character: He was witty, charming, courtly, a skilled horseman and a keen shot, and even took some part in military action (on the royalist side, of course). Tired of being the subject of teasing and mockery, he challenged one of his mockers to a duel with pistols and killed him. Ironically, Page reflects, Hudson’s act of self-assertion would cost him everything. Exiled by the queen, he was captured at sea by the dreaded Barbary pirates and spent the second 25 years of his life as a slave in North Africa. By the time he was able to return to England in 1669, the world he had known was all but vanished.

It is possible to find in any past age “a distant mirror” of our own times. The Barbary pirates, notes Page, “were the terrorists of their day, guerrilla seafarers ... [T]he one thing that might have stopped the pirates--a combined effort on the part of the European powers--was impossible to achieve. Indeed, instead of working together to prevent the piracy, the consuls of various nations--notably England and France--spent their time persuading the Barbary states to break peace with their rivals. Since the pirate states never respected any treaty in the first place, this was something of a redundant effort ... “ Nor was their case strengthened by the fact that the European powers also practiced piracy when it suited them.

One may also find a parallel between the Carolingian court’s passion for entertainments known as masques and our own era’s preference for visual effects over intelligent discourse. Where only a generation or two earlier English theater meant Shakespeare or Ben Jonson, by the time of Charles I, Jonson himself was reduced to writing masques and railing against his collaborator, the architect and set designer Inigo Jones.

Jones’ technical virtuosity was dazzling: storms with thunder and lightning, roiling oceans, white clouds from which goddesses or angels descended onto the stage. But the taste for special effects went side by side with a disdain for intellectual content. This preference for gaudy spectacle was sadly characteristic of Charles I’s court. Page observes: “With ... his foreign policy in tatters and his coffers empty, faced with the need to manage a Parliament that would be bitter, resentful and out for revenge, Charles did what he was best at. He held a masque.” For the doomed, inflexible, but well-meaning king, masques helped mask reality.

In “Lord Minimus,” one is reminded, alas, of our current fashions in films, of the photo ops and sound bites that are edging out political discourse (not to mention the ritualistic round of forums and conferences where our modern rulers make a show of addressing problems). Page’s colorful account of one of history’s minor players helps expand our understanding of the past and present alike.