It was not until Caroline days that the smouldering antagonism between Jonson and Jones broke out into open warfare, and stung Jonson to various indiscretions, amongst them the ironical outburst of the famous Expostulation—
Painting and carpentry are the soul of masque![1]
Of thirteen spectacular masks given at court from 1605 to
1613 nine were certainly contrived by Jones, and there is no
positive evidence that the other four were not his.[2] He had
also a share in the preparations for Prince Henry's barriers
of 1610. When the prince set up his household in the following
December Jones was appointed surveyor of his works. After
Henry's death he obtained a reversion of a similar appointment
in the royal Office of Works, but this reversion did not
fall in until the death of Simon Basil on 1 October 1615,
and after the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth in 1613
Jones paid a visit of some duration to Italy. He therefore
took no part in the masks for the Somerset wedding during
the following winter. For one at least of these, Campion's
Mask of Squires, his substitute was Constantine de' Servi,
a Florentine who had also been in the service of Henry as
his architect; but Campion was not pleased with his coadjutor,
and wrote that 'he being too much of himself, and no
way to be drawn to impart his intentions, failed so far in the
assurance he gave that the main invention, even at the last
cast, was of force drawn into a far narrower compass than
was from the beginning intended'. Jones was back in
England by 29 January 1615, and was to plan many more
masks before his death in 1652. But none can be definitely
ascribed to him before Jonson's Mask of Christmas in 1617.
During the latter part of his career he was busy as an architect,
and the present banqueting-house in Whitehall, built during
1619-22, represents a fragment of one of his grandiose
schemes for the complete reconstruction of the old palace.
The concentrated setting, as it took shape in the first period
- ↑ Cunningham, Jonson, iii. 211.
- ↑ Mask of Blackness (1605); Hymenaei (1606); Haddington Mask (1608); Mask of Queens (1609); Tethys' Festival (1610); Oberon (1611); Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly (1611); Lords' Mask (1613); Chapman's Mask (1613). The designers of the Hay Mask (1607), Beaumont's Mask (1613), and the Mask of the Twelve Months are not named. Jonson says that the scene of the Mask of Beauty (1608) was 'put in act' by the King's Master Carpenter. This was an officer of the Works, one William Portington (Jupp, Carpenters' Company, 165). He was not necessarily the designer, but Jonson does not, as one would expect, mention Jones. Love Restored (1612) had a chariot, but perhaps no scene. The Irish Mask (1613) seems to be a Jacobean example of the simple mask. The Caversham Mask (1613) is another, but this was not at court.
